Somewhere Clover the rainbow...

I will admit that on occasion, I am a touch late to the party on some movies. Even with the best will in the world, there’s only so much money I can spend on cinema tickets; sadly being an adult means my hard-earned cash has to go on important things like mortgage repayments, electricity bills, and pressure washers. That doesn’t mean I don’t splash loads of it away on Lego and other dumb stuff in an ever-increasingly vain attempt to convince myself I’m not over the hill yet. Using phrases like over the hill probably isn’t helping, but onwards we press. With cinema tickets costing as much as they do, before you even get into extra-hyper-super 4K über definition with whatever the latest sound system they’ve designed to rupture everyone’s eardrums the first time any dialogue louder than whisper is uttered, you’ve forked out a weeks’ wages on popcorn you’ll finish before the opening credits roll, a drink that’ll make you want to piss like a racehorse at the most pivotal on-screen moment imaginable and the opportunity to sit next to some pleb who genuinely feels the need to give a running commentary to his mate about everything that the entire cinema just watched happen, laugh too loudly at the wrong bits in the movie and probably live-tweet the surprise twist for a full house on Cinema Dickhead Bingo. I realise that on the face of that I probably shouldn’t go for a job in the marketing department of pretty much any cinema chain, but I really actually do enjoy going to the movies.

Sometimes I have to kick myself, in terms of missing stuff. Lego Batman went unseen because I couldn’t make any of the matinee showings. I get it, it’s a kid’s movie really, so I can’t moan too much about it getting limited evening slots. I have neither reason nor excuse for missing John Wick 2, especially seeing how much I enjoyed the first one. Come to think of it, I never saw the first one at the cinema, so maybe my subconscious was telling me I really didn’t need to bother because I’d enjoy it either way. It’s why I love DVDs; for the price of a cinema admission I can watch it over and over if it’s good, or watch it once and forget its existence completely and I haven’t lost out. Everyone comes out a winner. Don’t start me on streaming/torrents/downloads and all that malarkey. I don’t partake, never will (except perhaps the new Ghostbusters which I’m probably going to have to watch form the sake of one of these posts but I’m so fundamentally, almost pathologically opposed to the idea paying for it in any way shape or form that I may have to bite a bullet. Before and possibly after). Sometimes it really pays off; you can pick up stuff on offer you’d never ordinarily bother with for the price of a sandwich. Hence I finally got round to watching 10 Cloverfield Lane. Longest set-up ever.

I found myself on the fence for Cloverfield; I liked some parts of it very much. The premise was good, the shaky cam footage didn’t annoy me as much as Blair Witch Project for example (which by the way is a god-awful sack of crap by the way) and it kept me interested throughout. That scene in the makeshift medical bay where she literally pops after being bitten by the parasite is great. It did suffer from that old monster movie classic: not enough monster. Now I get that you need to have some mystery, but there just wasn’t enough of a pay-off for me. It also suffered, personally speaking from that second monster movie classic: most of the rejected monster concepts were better than the final design. It isn’t quite as guffaw-inspiring as the wobbly-nosed, week-old blancmange-coloured disaster that was the Alien/Human hybrid in Alien: Resurrection, but close. Some of those Alien concepts were pretty awesome and the end result looks like they dropped one of the macquettes in transport and were so pushed for time they just went with it. The Cloverfield monster doesn’t even have an official name that I’m aware of and has this weird insect sort of vibe going on. It just looked way too gangly and not terribly menacing really. At least that’s what I could gather from the limited screen time. So overall, it was OK, but I wasn’t blown away.

10 Cloverfield Lane is, pun completely intended, an altogether different beast. Not officially a sequel, but sort of completely a sequel, it’s another one of these movies that doesn’t really know what it wants to be. It’s mostly a sort of psychological thriller based on whether or not John Goodman has saved two people’s lives or kidnapped them for the sake of whatever weird and devious reasons he has. It’s fairly effective for an hour or so; Goodman is pretty creepy and you really aren’t sure what his motives are. It does roll out a bunch of clichés and even the bigger twisty moments aren’t really showstoppers; they were clearly trying to save that for the grand finale. There’s an almost throwaway allusion to an invading Alien fleet which everybody just shrugs off because it’s already weird enough in a bunker whose owner insists on being in the room when you go to toilet. So when our plucky heroine, conveniently a clothes designer or something, fashions a D.I.Y. hazmat suit out of a shower curtain and 3 litre Coke bottle, melts John Goodman’s face with some conveniently nasty acid and escapes outside we find… he was right all along, it’s aliens and they’re totally gassing humans like cockroaches. Luckily, said aliens hadn’t configured their advanced chemical weapons to penetrate your average B&Q dust mask filter and a liberal application of gaffer tape. (In fairness, if you can't fix something with gaffer tape, you aren't using enough gaffer tape). Nor had they effectively shielded their armour against a flaming bottle of vino. Did literally nobody learn from the Death Star? Nobody?

It’s such an unsatisfying pay off. It makes sense within the Cloverfield Universe to an extent, but really I can’t help feel all the real drama and tension stayed locked in the bunker with John Goodman’s very passable Two-Face cosplay. The aliens are briefly shown under cover of darkness, nominally to give us that mystique that monster movies always aim for, and not just because the design is a bit sort of generic; it doesn’t seem to look like the original Cloverfield monster, so it becomes a case of knowing they’re in the same world because of the title of the movie and because the promotional interviews told us it was. It’s not really a sequel, that much is true, but it falls short of being its own entity simply because of the obvious effort that they’ve put into trying to link the two movies whilst trying not to link them, a move that shall now be known as “pulling a Prometheus”. Kudos to everyone involved for not making another shaky cam, found footage effort, but that final third takes all that creepy, tense atmosphere, takes a serious run up and punts it square in the parasite-riddled alien insect nuts. Shame.