A while back, I started hearing things about a new Cloverfield movie on Netflix – The Cloverfield Paradox. When I heard that it was pretty bad, I immediately figured I should make the time to watch it for a good laugh. It had been a long time since I had seen the original Cloverfield, and I was aware of 10 Cloverfield Lane (but hadn’t seen it), so I decided a trilogy viewing was in order, and promptly made plans for a Saturday with nothing else going on.
What follows is my thoughts on each movie, and how they work as a whole. There are definitely spoilers, but each movie segment is short, so it may not be too bad.
Cloverfield
The original Cloverfield movie is interesting in that it overlays a love story and a monster movie in a way that I haven’t seen since the disaster movies of the 90s. Its main schtick though is that it’s all filmed from the perspective of someone on the ground with a home camera (i.e. the camera is always moving).
It’s worth mentioning right off that I did not like the camerawork on this movie. While it was certainly different from a lot of other films at the time (The Blair Witch Project being the only other one that jumps to mind), I don’t feel like it really added anything to the movie that couldn’t have been done better by more traditional cinematography. I also feel like it distracted a lot from the movie as it became more of a focus than the plot or the story.
That’s not to say that the plot or the story here were weak. Looked at through the lens of a disaster movie, Cloverfield follows the formula very well – a couple is separated during a disaster, one member is given the opportunity to escape, but jeopardizes all to rescue the other. I actually really liked that the protagonists were not heroes here – they don’t have enough knowledge or context to help save the city – they’re just running scared trying to make their way. I also really like that it is framed as a tragedy – it felt right given the context at the beginning of the movie that, inevitably, their love was to be short-lived.
Thankfully, Cloverfield was the shortest of the three movies (with a running time of only 87 minutes), because I also felt it was the weakest. It set an interesting stage for the other movies, however, and I think 10 Cloverfield Lane would not be nearly as good without it.
10 Cloverfield Lane
Coming right from watching Cloverfield, it became clear very quickly that this film was going to be different than its predecessor. The main conflict here is the protagonist (Michelle) being locked in a bomb shelter, against her will, with the somewhat erratic man who claims to have saved her life (Howard) and that of another survivor (Emmett). The main conflict here is between whether Howard’s intentions are good, evil, or crazy and whether the danger outside is real or fake.
This uncertainly sets up the perfect avoidance situation. When Michelle sees someone die at the front door to the shelter, Howard suddenly doesn’t seem so bad – they’ve got food, air, water… But when it looks like Howard may have kidnapped a local girl and trapped her in the shelter some years back, the unknown outside doesn’t seem so bad. The ebb and flow of this uncertainty was quite artfully done, and really made the movie work.
Beyond that though, there was another mystery, this time in the relationship between the movie and the viewer. Having just watched Cloverfield, and recognizing that this is part of the same trilogy, I was constantly asking myself, “is there a monster just outside this bomb shelter?” All it took was a single line by Howard, and I was forced to decide whether Howard was a complete loon or whether he was right, and then do I root for the Michelle to successfully escape? This made for a fantastic movie experience, and I was quite impressed.
In this way, I felt that 10 Cloverfield Lane was the best of the three movies. It had precisely the right pace, and pulled me along in just the right way to make everything work. I was very interested then to figure out how this one would set up the last movie in the trilogy – for that review, however, as well as my final thoughts on the trilogy as a whole, you’ll have to wait until next week.