Nerds That Geek Movie Review: ’10 Cloverfield Lane’

Written by Scott Edwards

There is something to be said for people that fear the end of the world. While the rest of us are worried about what happened in the past, they are looking towards the future and coming up with plans on how to survive anything that might be coming our way. Building fallout shelters is one way that folks are preparing for the end of the world and these are great idea. Being embedded in the earth’s crust, away from what is happening on the surface may be a great way to survive for quite some time and even though there might be some hard questions to ask about living there, there may not be an answer until you actually have to hunker down and lock the door from the outside world.

Trying to run away from her bad situation, Michelle is driving along when her car gets sideswiped off of the road. Waking up in a strange room with an IV in her arm and chain on her leg, she has no idea what happened, much less where she is. Seeing that his new guest has woken up, Howard brings her something to eat and knows that she is in for the shock of a lifetime. Trying to be hospitable, he gives her the key to unlock herself and some crutches to help with her knee until it heals. But Michelle believes that she has been kidnapped and uses her knowhow to get whittle a spear out of one of the crutches to try and fashion an escape. Not getting noticed as quickly as she wants for her attack, she sets an old shirt on fire to get Howard’s attention.

Arriving and subduing the situation quickly, Howard explains to the young woman that the world outside is not what she remembers. Not knowing if it is gas or nukes, everyone on the outside is dying and there is no stopping it. Needing to wait it out, being safe underground for a couple of years is not completely out of the question. Finding out that there is someone else in the bunker with her as well, Emmett makes himself known and tries to help Michelle understand what has just happened in the world above, but when she hears a car driving over her room, she even questions Emmett’s sanity. But when Howard decides to show the woman what he knows to be true through the window of the bunker, she is starts to understand that there is something happening outside, but not knowing exactly what, is killing her.

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Wanting to escape never leaves Michelle’s mind as she is trying to come up with a plan of how to get Howard’s keys to unlock the door. Flirting a little bit with Emmett at the dinner table, she is able to see the rage that Howard has kept inside and uses it to her advantage. Smashing her host in the head with a beer bottle, Michelle is able to make it to the top of the bunker, but when she sees a sick woman outside wanting to get in, she finds out that what she has been hearing is true. Knowing that there might no longer be life as she knows it outside, she starts to give in to what she has been told and is making the best of things with her captor underground. With everyone more at ease with each other, Michelle gets to know Howard and the love he had for his daughter, but when finding out that the girl in the picture was not his daughter, but a kidnapped victim, she knows that it is time to leave, she can only hope that Howard does not find out that she has a plan and he will not be able to stop her.

You know, I have been waiting to see this movie ever since it came out and when our movie group canceled on it due to scheduling, I should have known something was up. I will give the movie one thing, the buildup and characters were great, but that was about it. I started to notice little nuance things starting to infect the screen, the main one being Howard’s head wound being bigger and smaller over the passage of time, and it grew bigger for sure as the story progressed. This does not really get to me, but when the finale of the movie started, I was less them impressed by the path that it took. 

​With a 'blink and you'll miss it mentality,' I am glad that I have the ability to watch this more than once to make sure I did not miss anything, but overall, not a huge fan of trying to set up a sequel. That is the one thing that the first movie did well, it just ended in a bang while this one tries to continue the story. I don’t know why it went so wrong, but it ruined the rest of the movie for me and while I really wanted to like it like the first one, there is no way that it should even be compared to it. Even the aliens were disappointing, different from the first Cloverfield, but very disappointing, the movie would have been fine without them. The psychological parts of this movie are well worth watching, but if you don’t want to feel like you have been cheated, you should turn the movie off when the second escape attempt takes place and leave it at that.

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