It's OK, nothing special

Rating: 6/10 (28 June 2016)

A girl leaves her boyfriend. Of course her sorry boyfriend begs her to come back. It's night on the road as she drives. Suddenly she crashes. She then wakes up with an IV and brace on her knee. The brace is chained to a wall. She freaks out. She's a in a room with some heavy duty steel door. A stranger comes in and offers food. He claims to have saved her, that something is going on outside and that they are save in his underground shelter. He leaves her the key so she can free herself and some crutches. She sharpens the end of the crutch and attacks the guy next time he walks in, but he defends himself and complains bitterly how she treats her even though he saved her life.
She hears some cars above, there's a scuffle. Once she becomes more compliant the guy, Howard, let's her out of the room and introduces her to Emmett who's got a broken arm, result of the scuffle with Howard when he somehow forced his way into the shelter. Little by little they get used to each other while always maintaining suspicion. No one knows what really happened outside. For some reason they have no radio, not sure if that would work in the situation, but they have no clue. Michelle continues to think she's held captive until someone screams and knocks on the entrance begging to be let in. Her face is burned. Michelle is dumb enough to actually try and let this woman in but the woman apparently dies.
Michelle is a fashion designer and at some point decides to make a home-made hazmat suit and gas mask with the help of Emmett. But Howard is also suspicious of these two and knows they are up to something. Emmett doesn't fare well in the ensuing confrontation. In the end Michelle barely makes it out and we learn what is really going on.
10 Cloverfield Lane is a bigger budget minimalist thriller. It's very risky to confine the audience with the few characters in a small space for most of a movie. Usually it turns into an obnoxious movie with a bunch of losers screaming at each other for two hours. This movie fortunately avoids that mistake. Yes, you're stuck with these three for nearly two hours and they sort of try to get along. Howard is a pia. But it makes for some tension, you never know when he is going to flip out or when the other two are going to to something stupid.
It's strange that the filmmakers decided to try and build suspense around the question of what it going on in the outside world, when the title of the movie somehow explains it. I haven't seen the first movie but I know what it is about. Hollywood continues to insist on the role-reversal business for who knows what reason. Michelle is both the brains and the brawl. Emmett is the dumb, useless damsel in distress and the other male is the villain. Also annoying was the beginning of this movie which takes place on mute, no dialogue, nor sound effects just lame orchestrated music and this goes on for a while. I almost gave up on this movie after that. The ending too is just a bit too far-fetched, even for a movie a like this. 10 Cloverfield Lane achieves more or less what it sets out to do, but in the end it is a film with low aspirations.