10 Cloverfield Lane: A short review
1:15PM
Look. I know.
I’m late to the game. Most of you have probably seen it in the theaters months ago and have your own opinions about it. But curiously I hadn’t seen it yet, until yesterday.
Since they finally released 10 Cloverfield Lane digitally and on physical media last weekend, I finally got a chance to catch it and see what the fuss was about. And the fuss was largely warranted, save for the ending which was kind of a letdown, at least for me.
We’ll get to that later. Don’t worry. On the off chance there are those reading this who haven’t seen the movie either, I won’t spoil it for you. Well, not much anyways.
This movie was under the radar during its production, and just suddenly popped out of seemingly nowhere, fully formed. This was a fact that worked well for the movie, as the audience didn’t know what the hell to expect. Even the trailers were cryptic and mysterious. All anyone needed to know was that J.J. Abrams was involved, and that was good enough for them.
By virtue of its title, it claimed a tenuous relationship with another movie called Cloverfield, a twitchcam captured footage movie which did reasonably well at the box office some years ago. And it does have some connection, though not directly. 10 Cloverfield Lane can stand alone, even if you never saw the other film.
It’s an intimate and very tight movie, and featured just three main characters thoughout the entire film: John Goodman as doomsday prepper Howard, Mary Elizabeth Winstead as the imprisoned bystander Michelle and John Gallagher Jr. as Emmett, the handyman who forces his way in the bunker with Howard (who he used to work for), when the shit hit the fan.
These three, by curious circumstance or the vagaries of fate, end up weathering out a world-ending catastrophe (or so Howard says; we never really know for sure until the final moments of the film) for weeks in an underground bunker in rural Louisiana. I won’t get into the details anymore, but suffice it to say this uncertainty (particularly for Michelle) fuels most of the movie, as we the audience don’t really know what’s happening to the world outside the bunker.
Acting chops, I got absolutely no complaints with. Goodman, Winstead and Gallagher all hold up their end pretty well. Particularly Goodman, who’s always excellent in anything he does. The tension between Howard and his two guests you can cut with a knife, and the unspoken back-and-forth between Michelle and Emmett spoke volumes. Subplots abound, as the complicated relationships among them make things very uncomfortable for our three protagonists in the cramped confines of the bunker.
A lot happens in the interim and I won’t spoil it for anyone, but when Michelle finally busts out of the bunker and sees what’s really happening outside, it was kinda a big letdown for me. For 10 Cloverfield Lane to suddenly take a left turn and become a run-of-the-mill science fiction movie and leave behind its taut, realistic, fatalistic storyline, I was pretty disappointed.
But then again, its the journey that counts, not necessarily the destination.
Two thumbs up!
Snacker Snarking