10 Cloverfield Lane is the greatest disappointing movie I’ve ever seen. When viewed on its own, it is an excellent suspense thriller with compelling characters, an intriguing mystery and a breakneck pace that keeps us glued to the screen until the last frame. Yet the film was not presented as its own thing, was it? There’s a fine line between marketing to keep audiences in the dark and using it to blatantly lie to them. And with 10 Cloverfield Lane, Bad Robot has shamelessly done the latter, playing us all for suckers by slapping "Cloverfield" onto an unrelated screenplay purely to ensure an impressive opening weekend. For that reason, despite the fact that the movie succeeds on its own merits, it’s difficult not to walk away feeling letdown considering how poorly 10 Cloverfield Lane fails to deliver on its title's promise.
The world was made aware of this movie just two months ago with Bad Robot dropping the trailer out of nowhere without even announcing that they were working on another Cloverfield. How cool is that? This was clearly an attempt to repeat the conditions the first film was unveiled in. You may recall that the Cloverfield trailer very mysteriously appeared in front of Transformers without a title, causing a massive amount of online buzz as we all tried to figure out what it was about.
In the 10 Cloverfield Lane trailer, which is similarly enigmatic, we’re introduced to a group of characters hiding out in an underground bunker after some sort of apocalyptic event. When Mary Elizabeth Winstead's Michelle gets a glimpse of the outside world, which has presumably been decimated by that giant monster from 2008, she covers her mouth in terror. Afterwards, the word “Cloverfield” ominously fades onto the screen for several seconds followed by “10” and “Lane," as almost an afterthought.
There is simply no way any reasonable human being could watch this and not think 10 Cloverfield Lane is a sequel to Cloverfield. That is quite clearly what the marketing department wants us to believe as “Cloverfield” pops up accompanied by a shaking sound. Could it be the creature approaching, perhaps? Yet the film itself may as well be titled Super 8 Road. It has just as much to do with that movie and even when presented opportunities to drop references to the events of the original in order to tie the two together, Bad Robot actively decides not to do so. We Cloverfield fanatics spent so much of the running time trying to come up with a way the two universes connect, but the sad reality is nobody involved in this production seemed interested in that. Our love of Cloverfield was used to trick us into seeing an unrelated thriller that would otherwise have performed poorly at the box office.
It would have been fine having the two stories be separate from each other if that was clear from the get-go. But right after that awesome trailer premiered, as fans furiously studied every frame and tried to come up with theories, all producer J.J. Abrams had to say was that this was a “blood relative” of the first one. None of us really knew what he was talking about, but the most common interpretation was that this was not a traditional sequel in that it had none of the same characters and didn’t follow up on the events of the original, but it still took place in the same universe and would likely feature the same monster.
We were all dead wrong. And the "blood relative" analogy makes little sense in retrospect. It implies a strong relationship, but the two films are more like very distant relatives who are not aware of each other's existence. It wasn’t until literally three days before 10 Cloverfield Lane opened in theaters that director Dan Trachtenberg nonchalantly said in an interview that this film is “on a separate timeline," directly contradicting comments J.J. Abrams had made that the two films were linked. Either the Bad Robot staff did a tremendously poor job of coordinating with each other about what the Cloververse is or they were acting mysterious for months on purpose, using phrases like “blood relative,” in order to leave room for interpretation that maybe this is a Cloverfield movie. Then, when it came out and fans were inevitably angry that it was a totally different thing, they would have plausible deniability, defending themselves by saying that they technically never claimed it was a sequel. They said it was a "blood relative!" What a bunch of crap.
Having seen 10 Cloverfield Lane, there is zero reason for it to have that title and the name actually hurts the film in more ways than one. Most glaringly, any ambiguity over what lies outside the bunker is ruined. Imagine making a film where we’re supposed to question whether there is a giant monster roaming the streets of Japan, but it’s called 11 Godzilla Avenue. Well, considering “Godzilla” is in the title, that might offer a clue, right? Just the fact that this is called Cloverfield suggests there's at least something science-fictiony going on. Whereas if the original title, The Cellar, was kept, we truly would not know. Plus, all the baggage we bring to the theater thanks to our relationship with the original distracts from the experience of watching this story unfold. Since we’re expecting a giant monster flick, we spend the whole time waiting for the characters to go outside so the real movie can begin. The title creates false expectations and an unnecessary distraction from what is an otherwise superb thriller.
It didn’t have to be this way. Bad Robot could have easily released the awesome trailer and then shortly afterwards J.J. Abrams or Dan Trachtenberg could have said, “We’re playing with a new idea here where Cloverfield will become an anthology series akin to The Twilight Zone, so although these two movies are both thrilling science-fiction stories, you should consider them to be two entirely different properties.” Instead, it wasn’t until days before the premiere that anyone involved dared to utter the word “anthology," which they should have been doing since January. By a few days before the premiere, it was too late and a large segment of the population would never see those interviews before buying tickets. They'll likely be leaving the theater this weekend tremendously unsatisfied and it's hard to blame them.
So why didn't Bad Robot show its hand earlier? Because, frankly, if they revealed the true nature of 10 Cloverfied Lane, not nearly as many people would go see it. J.J. Abrams’ mystery box can be effective at keeping audiences in the dark about a movie so that when they see it, it truly surprises them. But here, the mystery box was used not to preserve an experience, but to trick the general public by implying a relatively simple story was more than it was. If this hit theaters and was called The Cellar, it would be just as fantastic a film and it could build up buzz as an awesome little suspense picture with a cool twist. Instead, like Halloween III: Season of the Witch, it will always be remembered as a great movie that, unfortunately, completely betrayed fans everywhere.
Screenshot via YouTube trailer.