There’s a strange doublethink at work in 10 Cloverfield Lane. The movie is set almost entirely inside of a bunker, and our protagonist, Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), is told by Howard (John Goodman), the man whose bunker she’s in, that the world outside has ended. All she remembers is being in a car crash, though, so part of the tension that fuels the movie is her feeling that she’s being lied to by a paranoid, deluded old man. But we know something that Michelle doesn’t. We know that she’s in a Cloverfield movie, and therefore that there’s some alien nonsense happening.
That tension between what we know and what Michelle knows is the fuel for much of what happens in 10 Cloverfield Lane, and a decade later, it feels like a road not taken. Weeks after this movie hit theaters, Batman fought Superman and Iron Man fought Captain America. The Cloverfield Paradox hit Netflix a few years later, and was so baffling that it killed the franchise off completely. For a brief moment, though, 10 Cloverfield Lane seemed like it could provide a roadmap for how to play inside of an existing franchise without making what is essentially just a really expensive TV show.
