Wednesday 20 April 2016

10 Cloverfield Lane and the Implications of the Branded Anthology Model

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.