10 Cloverfield Lane was an interesting film to see particularly as
it clarified some thoughts that I’d been having about the Alien series since
well before Prometheus arrived. I
went to see it because of a throwaway comment made by Kim Newman in a bit of
exposition to his review of the film made on his blog:
Artistically, Halloween III
Season of the Witch was the right choice … but audiences didn’t warm to the
notion of a branded anthology series of films, so John Carpenter quit and other
hands turned the franchise back into an endless exercise in the Same Exact
Thing Again. Fuck you, 1983 film fans
for screwing things up for the rest of time.
I don’t know the Halloween
series of movies, but my understanding is that John Carpenter decided that
instead of a routine sequel to Halloween
II, there was scope to expand the franchise beyond the perimeters of the
familiar characters, plot, storyline and setting, and instead make a completely
independent story that would take place in the same ‘world’ as its precursors
but be a completely original entity. 10
Cloverfield Lane, as Newman points out, is derived from this interesting
notion – that a film with a strong enough brand identity isn’t necessarily
constrained to reproduce itself ad
infinitum with sequels that feature minor variations on one existing theme
or that are slavishly compelled to recycle the same characters.
It’s well known that the Alien Series succumbed to these
problems, particularly over iterations three and four, where during early
preproduction various dilemmas were navigated over whether the franchise could
survive without the character of Ripley. There are a number of unsuccessful
drafts of Alien 3 scripts that
declined to continue Ripley’s story, most notably amongst them David Twohy’s
iffy prison-ship caper and Eric Red’s simplistic, execrable cosmic barnyard
romp. Both were stupid and would have made rubbish films, each failing in their
own distinctive way to capture the essential properties of the Alien series;
but in a weird way, both would actually have represented an advance for the franchise
(I am not saying Alien 3 is no good,
just that it is a sequel in the most conventional sense). Even William Gibson’s
fairly passable script for Alien 3 was
felt too dicey to constitute a credible continuation of the series, featuring a
comatose Ripley who does not awake for the entire film having being injured in
a fire whilst in her cryotube during the prologue. And then, even after Ripley died in Alien 3, Fox exec Jorge Saralegui
decided that the way to resurrect the franchise was to resurrect Ripley,
consigning Joss Whedon to the task of contriving a way to bring her back. So
let’s admit that the people in charge of the Alien franchise can hardly be said
to be at the cutting edge of this field.
What am I driving at? Well, 10 Cloverfield Lane has no straightforward connection to the
original Cloverfield film. Indeed in
many respects it is remarkably different. It shares little other than a
dispensation, certain thematic concerns, and, of course, brand recognition. I
am not going to elaborate the various qualities, both aesthetic and in terms of
marketing, that were characteristic of the original Cloverfield movie, as they are already well known. Nonetheless,
it’s important to grasp that its approach to the medium was what marked it out
as distinctive. It eschewed well-worn conventions of representation and thereby
created a new logic by which it could operate. Granted, the found-footage lark
was still clichéd, and the execution was rebarbative, but that is not the
point. The genius of Cloverfield was
not the hacks that reinvented Godzilla by having some asshole with a camcorder
film it, but that it could lead to its sister film (not sequel) 10 Cloverfield Lane.
There is much more to like about 10 Cloverfield Lane than Cloverfield.
It’s a better film. Why? Because it
doesn’t need to follow any rules. What do you get? A taut, claustrophobic
thriller, well-plotted, well-paced, well-executed; in fact, up until the last
five minutes, something so cleanly and economically written it could
practically be staged as a play. The vast majority of the film plays out in a
home-made nuclear bunker constructed by survivalist lunatic and apocalypse
fantasist John Goodman. He plays the taciturn and rather unaccommodating host
to kidnappee Mary Elizabeth Winsted, who he claims he has rescued from a road
accident and then an unspecified Armageddon scenario, an ‘attack’ that has
contaminated the air and made it suicidal to go outside. However, unexpectedly,
this desperately flimsy and patently ludicrous explanation is corroborated by
local lad John Gallagher Jr, and then by a neat reversal wherein Winsted gets
to the brink of escaping only to discover that horrifyingly mutated people are
in fact trying to get into the shelter. So it looks like Goodman’s zany
moontalk is actually legit.
I haven’t read a lot about 10 Cloverfield Lane, but I’m willing to bet it’s most commonly
compared to Xavier Gens’ 2011 movie The
Divide, where the inhabitants of a New York apartment block escape a
nuclear attack by bunking up in the basement with survivalist lunatic and
apocalypse fantasist Michael Beihn. Thereafter the situation deteriorates into
a Lord of the Flies scenario as
cliques form and characters seek to exert dominance over others in the absence
of any supervisory presence. With the sizeable Goodman in the lead role, 10 Cloverfield Lane is more Lord of the
Pies than Lord of the Flies, but in fact it reminded me most of Luis Buñuel’s
1962 masterpiece The Exterminating Angel,
where a group of tiresome middle-class assholes aren’t able to leave the room
after a dinner party and no-one can work out why. Here, throughout 10 Cloverfield Lane, Winsted would love to leave the bunker, but she can’t
and she doesn’t know why. Here’s the neat twist: when she finally does escape
the bunker, Winsted discovers that there has indeed been a large scale attack,
and it’s been perpetuated by biomechanical aliens that are combing the
countryside in the aftermath picking off stragglers of the initial assault. At
this point the movie reminded me of M. Night Shyamalam’s Signs, a film which also features much cowering prior to an
imminent alien attack, but which is most notable for Mel Gibson delivering the
line ‘everyone in this family needs to calm down and eat some fruit.’
It is of course the alien attack which is the umbilical
between 10 Cloverfield Lane and Cloverfield. Both films focus on a specific individual’s
plight in the context of a wider disaster scenario engendered by the unexpected
attack of a vast, mysterious agent. In Cloverfield
it was implied that the beast that attacked New York came from the sea, but
this is never fully delineated, just as here the strong hint is that the
invaders come from off-planet. There isn’t an intrinsic relationship between
the sea beast and the aliens, and there doesn’t have to be. The situations
don’t need to match up or be co-ordinated in any conventional way. Here we see
the benefits of the branded anthology structure: flexibility, opportunity for
innovation, lack of necessity for adherence to templates and formula. And the
result: how nice to have ninety minutes of well-crafted character, exposition,
plot, and tension as the benchmark for this iteration of the franchise. No
tiresome exposition that has to be laboriously delivered to keep newbies on the
same page as adherents to a prior movie. Those bemoaning that the last five
minutes are a betrayal of the film’s patient, principled setup miss the point.
The denouement is a clever structural contrivance that collapses into the
naturalism in an intentionally jarring way, and is in fact is meant to undercut
it.
The implications of this model for the Alien series is
clear. Perhaps more than any other film property, the Alien movies have been
the vehicle for a plethora of non-canonical activity. This has been explored in
a variety of mediums, some of which have cleaved quite closely to the scenarios
described in the Alien series, some of which share literally nothing other than
the titular creature itself. We’ve all read the novels and comics, and none of
us have ever bridled about the fact that these spinoffs deviate from the
primary material. In fact, on the odd occasion that (say) Ripley does show up (I’m looking at you, The Female War), the usage of the
characters seems forced and fraudulent.
Where I wish Fox had grasped the nettle was in taking a cue
from the profusion of non-canonical versions of the Alien series and adopting
the branded anthology. Instead they made a reprehensibly bad Alien 4 and
frittered away what goodwill they had left on the Alien vs Predator spin-off.
But if they’d done it properly they wouldn’t have to rely on low-quality
spinoffs and had to tediously rebirth the series through Prometheus: they could have been ahead of the game in what is now a
commonplace in the methodology of generating thematically related movies (all
these Marvel films, as I understand it, but I won’t be able to comment on them
because I don’t watch them). Hey, Fox, are you hard up at the moment? Make a
low-budget Alien film with three characters in one location. Get someone that
isn’t an idiot to write it and scale it back so you can work in things like
tension, characterisation, and a proper dramatic structure. Make it about some attempt
to stop a flood of contagion or introduce a new species of the creature.
Feeling rich? Make a standalone trilogy about the battle for earth. Not every
spin-off has to be inferior. And why are we looking at a three-film version of Prometheus? Because despite everything
that was said about it at the time, it is a retread, as everyone who knows
anything about the series knows – it’s honouring Ridley Scott’s own original
idea about ‘going back to the planet where they came from’ that he’s been
prattling on about since making the original movie. An idea nearly thirty years
in the making that ended up precisely as ill-defined and nebulous as the first
time it was enunciated.