A Good Suspense-Thriller Weakened By An Unnecessary Sci-Fi Turn At The End

Rating: 6/10 (17 January 2017)

For the most part, "10 Cloverfield Lane" is a very good thriller, very suspenseful and certainly manages to keep the viewers on the edge of their seat. From the start you're not entirely sure what's happening, and the scenes in the bunker are almost surreal in the way they move from menacing to sheer domestic. The atmosphere in the bunker was superb, and fit the genre of the movie perfectly, and director Dan Trachtenberg used it well. The highlight of the movie for me was John Goodman. I confess that I'm not really a big fan of Goodman, but I'd be prepared to say that this may have been the best performance I've seen him give. As Howard, he can be both scary and charming, and there's mystery about him. From the very start you don't really know if he's a good guy or a bad guy; if he's telling the truth or lying through his teeth.
The movie begins with a car accident. Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is leaving her boyfriend and gets into a bad accident. When she awakens she's chained to the wall in a room, apparently a prisoner of Howard. But is she a prisoner? Howard tells her that there's been some type of attack (nuclear or chemical) and that he found her and brought her into the bunker to save her life, because the air outside is unbreathable. Is that true? We wonder for a while, but there seems to be enough supporting his story to make us believe him. There's a second prisoner or guest - Emmett (John Gallagher, Jr.) about whom we learn very little. How did he get there? We're not sure. Howard, Emmett and Michelle seem to settle in for the long haul, convinced that they can't get out. Howard is a bit unbalanced, and you get the impression that you can never really be sure how he's going to react to things. He clearly was a prepper - believing that something like this was going to happen, and maybe a little bit shocked that it actually did. Emmett and Michelle wonder about escaping - but escaping to where? Is there anything left outside the bunker? Could they survive if they left?
It's very suspenseful, and then as far as I was concerned it was ruined by the ending, which turned into some sort of alien/sci-fi sort of film. I knew that as always a possibility, but I was hoping that the movie would take a different direction. It was working quite well for me just as the mystery of Howard and the bunker, which the confined atmosphere creating more than enough suspense. I didn't really need aliens. Somehow, for me, that took away from what had been making the movie work so well.
Supposedly this is described as a "spiritual successor" to the 2008 film "Cloverfield." Maybe - but you don't need to have seen "Cloverfield" for this to make sense. I wouldn't call it a sequel in the normal use of the term and I can't really say that anything in this really made me think about "Cloverfield." It's capable of standing on its own. It's a taut little suspense/thriller with an ending that could have been better.