10 CLOVERFIELD LANE: The Film Babble Blog Review

Now playing at a multiplex near you:

10 CLOVERFIELD LANE

(Dir. Dan Trachtenberg, 2016)

Warning: This review contains major Spoilers!

Forget about how, or if, this movie is supposed to be connected to the J.J. Abrams-produced 2008 fake found footage alien invasion flick CLOVERFIELD, Dan Trachtenberg’s directorial debut, 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE (also Abrams-produced), is a damn fine thriller that stands on its own.

It starts with a bang – or a bunch of bangs, really, as we witness a young woman named Michelle, played by N.C. native Mary Elizabeth Winstead, get in a nasty nighttime automobile accident out in the middle of nowhere (actually rural Louisiana) that leaves her car flipped over by the side of the road.

Michelle, who had just left her boyfriend (Bradley Cooper, in cellphone voice only), wakes up later in a windowless, concrete room with her leg handcuffed to a pipe. Her captor, or savior as he would say, is a large, gruff man named Howard (John Goodman), who tells her that there’s been an attack, by either the Russians or Martians, and the outside air is contaminated, but they’re safe in his well-stocked underground bunker, which he built just for such an occasion.

There’s one other person there, Emmett (The Newsroom’s John Gallagher, Jr.), who helped build the bunker and collaborates Howard’s story, saying that he saw the “flash” of light, and headed to Howard’s for shelter. However, Michelle, now unchained and free to move about, remains skeptical especially after she sees Howard’s truck through a window on the ground level and recognizes it as the vehicle that hit her car.

During a tense dinner scene, Michelle is able to steal Howard’s keys and runs to escape. She is halted in the airlock by a scary sickly woman (Suzanne Cryer) pounding on the glass to get in, while Howard screams “Don’t open that door!”

After that incident, things calm down and the three adjust to their life in the bunker via a montage – luckily there’s a jukebox in the recreation area and Tommy James & The Shondells’ “I Think We're Alone Now” gets a nicely used spin as Michelle, Howard, and Emmett watch movies *, read, and work on a jigsaw puzzle.

After he confesses that he accidentally crashed into her car, Michelle even begins to trust Howard, but his mentions of his daughter Megan who died mysteriously make her again give pause. So Michelle and Emmett start hatching a plan to escape involving making an airtight suit out of a shower curtain and a gas mask out of 2 liter bottles.

It would spill too much of the contents of what Abrams calls a “mystery box,” to go much further with the plot, but I’ll just say that the last third gets into WAR OF THE WORLDS territory (hey, I warned you about Spoilers!). This reveal will be divisive as some will think that it cheapens the pot boiler set up, but I found it to be an effective, and exciting finale. And I so much more enjoyed Winstead fighting aliens here than in that forgettable THE THING prequel.

Trachtenberg, working from Josh Campbell, Matt Stuecken, and Damien Chazelle’s clever screenplay, keeps an engaging pace – I can’t recall any part that dragged – and gets solid performances from all three leads. Howard is Goodman’s juiciest, and most layered role in ages, and he plays it to the hilt, convincingly inhabiting the skin of this very scary man, but one who’s not without warmth.

Winstead, who appears to be building quite a resume as a horror scream queen, does a great energetic job with making us feel and think alongside the character of Michelle, in all her desperate stress. Gallagher, Jr.’s Emmett could be seen as the comic relief at times as he gets in a few choice one-liners, but I believe Goodman got the film’s biggest laugh at the screening I saw when he said that he was a “reasonable man.”

10 CLOVERFIELD LANE is a genuinely scary, and intensely gripping experience that goes to show that franchise films don’t have to be sequels (or prequels); they can effectively be stand alone stories, from completely different corners of conflict, that take place in the same world.

Here’s hoping the same approach works for that ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY deal coming out later this year.



* In one scene, Goodman is watching PRETTY IN PINK, which he says was his daughter's favorite movie. It's a nice shout-out as the beloved '80s teen classic celebrated its 30th birhtday just last week (released: Feb. 28, 1986). Happy belated Birthday PRETTY IN PINK!

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For The First Time Since 1983, STAR WARS Is Really Back

Opening tomorrow at every multiplex in the galaxy:

STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS

(Dir. J.J. Abrams, 2015)

As suspected, J.J. Abrams is much, much better suited for STAR WARS than STAR TREK.

Abrams’ TREK movies were poppy, new fangled approximations of the Star Trek ethos, but his highly anticipated seventh entry in the ultra popular space saga, THE FORCE AWAKENS, really is a bonafide, honest-to-God, gloriously old school STAR WARS movie.

It captures the spirit and replicates the story beats of the original 1977 film so lovingly that it is almost a virtual remake, but that back-to-basics approach hugely works in its favor because, unlike the awful prequels, it’s not cluttered and all over the place.

Now, in order to keep from revealing major spoilers – the kind that would keep people from reading reviews like this in the first place – I’ll try to be as vague as I can with plot points, and other juicy tidbits.

It’s 30 years after the events in RETURN OF THE JEDI, and instead of the Empire and the Rebel Alliance we now have “The First Order,” and “The Resistance.” Darth Vader’s successor, clothed in similar black attire with metal mask and cape, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), is, of course, trying to crush The Resistance and find Luke Skywalker who’s gone missing.

On a desert planet that highly resembles Tatooine, but is called Jakku, we meet a scavenger named Rey (Daisy Ridley) who befriends BB-8, that cute orange and white spinning droid you’ve probably seen in trailers and TV teasers, who is being hunted by The First Order because he’s carrying a secret message to be delivered to The Resistance. Sound familiar?

Meanwhile, John Boyega (ATTACK THE BLOCK) plays a storm trooper who defects and joins forces with Rey, under the guise that he’s in The Resistance. Fleeing from The First Order, Rey, Finn, and BB-8 happen upon The Millenium Falcon in a space ship junkyard, and luckily it still holds together for their escape.

Before long the Falcon is captured by a large freighter owned by famed smuggler, and rebel hero Han Solo (Harrison Ford in his most invested performance in eons) and that beloved hairy Wookie, Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew), who, unlike Han, hasn’t aged a day.

That’s as much of the plot as I need to go into. You can most likely guess that there is a new Death Star (Starkiller Base) to destroy, a cantina-like scene, light saber battles, X-Wings and Tie Fighter dogfights, and revelations about who’s related to whom.

Carrie Fisher reprises her role as Leia Organa, now a General, with Anthony Daniels back as C-3PO, and Kenny Baker back inside R2-D2, but he hasn’t been the same since Master Luke vanished. 

The new kids, Boyega and Ridley, have great gusto and likable pluck in their roles and are a lot of fun to watch run around through battle station corridors, Endor-like forests, and snowy Hoth-type terrain. It's like they split the role of Luke into the two characters, who both long for better destinies before getting swooped up into the galactic battle between good and evil.

As for Luke, we all know that Mark Hamill has signed back on, but going into how he appears would be ultra spoilery so I won't go there.


As for the other new characters, Oscar Isaac, who gets some wise-cracks in (he also appears to be having more fun than I've ever seen him have in a movie), plays Poe Dameron, an ace X-Wing fighter pilot for The Resistance; a stern Domhnall Gleeson (Isaac’s EX MACHINA co-star) plays the evil First Order General Hux, Lupita Nyong’o plays the motion capture-enhanced alien pirate/bar owner Maz Kanata (sort of the movie’s Yoda), and Andy Serkis lends his distinctive talents to embodying the sinister Supreme Leader Snoke (another motion-capture creation), the new Emperor-esque figure.

And who knew that Driver, best known as Lena Dunham's weird, lanky boyfriend on the HBO show Girls, would make such a great STAR WARS villain? He nails the intensity needed for Kylo Ren, and gives him just the right amount of ache as well.

It’s also nice that their dialogue, written by Abrams, Michael Arndt (LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE, TOY STORY 3), and returning series scribe Lawrence Kasdan, is sharp and witty with just the right amount of call backs. This is especially notable in Han and Leia’s scenes, though I wish they fought a little, with that old Tracy/Hepburn-ish back and forth so memorable in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. Fisher, who had to slim down to reprise the part, brings gravitas in the form of her older, dignified Leia, but they could've given her a little more to do. However, that's a small complaint considering.

George Lucas may have created STAR WARS, but somewhere along the line he lost its vision. Abrams sure found it here, as one of the best things that I can report is that while watching THE FORCE AWAKENS, I really did forget about the prequels. Abrams’ film is so immensely entranced with the look, feel, and tone of the original trilogy that all that nonsense about senate treaties, midichlorians, Qui-Gon Jinn, Palpatine, etc. never comes to mind. It’s remarkable how successful it is in rendering Episodes I-III non-canon.

Sure, there's lots of CGI, but little of the aforementioned clutter of the prequels or many recent sci-fi action films. I really appreciate that Abrams had real sets and models built, and relied on practical effects when possible. David Mindel's cinematography lovingly apes the look of the original trilogy, as John Williams reworks all the mighty musical cues of his previous series' scores effectively. 


As a rekindling of the magic of the space opera that I loved as a kid, STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS is a fantastic success. Abrams really pulled off a wonderful, faithful, funny, and intoxicatingly fun entry that had me from the first line of the opening crawl to its powerful last shot. For the first time since 1983, STAR WARS is really back.

When Han says “Chewie, we’re
home,” he might as well be speaking for the masses that are going to eat this up, and go back
again and again for more.

More later...