I just came from watching 10 Cloverfield Lane (Read that how you want). I was super excited for this film, as I liked the first film immensely, and loved the marketing campaign. I mean to announce a film TWO MONTHS before its release these days is an insurmountable achievement. And that trailer… well needless to say it made me excited.
Then I watched it. SPOILERS… Seriously, no turning back now. There are a lot of things that I like about this movie.
The premise is fun: A Bug-out Doomsday Prepper is actually right for a change and houses a few other people long enough to try to kill them both. Then one of them gets out and sees what caused the catastrophe.
The cast is fantastic. John Goodman and Mary Elizabeth Winstead really steal the show. Goodman is electrifying and I couldn’t take my eyes off of him.
Tying this film into Cloverfield was also something that I enjoyed.
Here’s what I DIDN’T enjoy.
They tried tying it into Cloverfield and did a damn poor job of it. Are we supposed to believe that the aliens who invaded Earth dropped a single Cloverfield monster out into the waters near Coney Island and that’s it? Shouldn’t you have sent twenty-five of these monsters in populous areas around the globe?
Are these even the same aliens?! They look nothing like the others from the original.
And what’s with the timeframe here? Are we to believe that this took place at the same time as the original? That was my assumption, but then again, she had an iPhone 6 Plus or higher. There was a date of 2015 in the film, and I believe that Emmett’s license had an issue date of 2011.
Sure, they could have set the first film in this time, no problem. It’s an easy explanation.
I truly enjoyed the thriller part of the film, and I love lore building, but slapping the Cloverfield title on top of this story doesn’t seem to fit the way I expected it to. Yes, I had some higher expectations than most, but lore building is one of my favorite things in filmmaking and it seems half-assed or misappropriated here.
The film was originally written as a standalone script titled “The Cellar.” It would have been better as just that.
What baffles me the most is that the film is currently sitting at a 91% on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s way too high for this type of schizophrenic film. I think it would have been a better movie if we never had the knowledge of the truth behind the outside world until the very end.
I can’t say how this film will sit with me after more rumination. I would definitely say it’ll sit on a better level down the road, but it was shocking how much the name Cloverfield took away from the movie. And that is the biggest problem with it.
Yes, this is rambling, but I’m not editing this free flow of thoughts for discussion, so please, discuss below.
-Jamie (@GuyOnAWire)
GuyOnAWire 