[Note: After learning some new information, we’ve provided some updates to this post.]
10 Cloverfield Lanedid not begin as aCloverfieldsequel or anything remotely related to the 2008 smash hit. It started as a small movie fromPortalfan film directorDan Trachtenbergwith the working titleValencia. This was the plot synopsis we reported inApril 2014:
“The majority of the movie takes place in an underground cellar, home to a teenage girl and a caretaker. The girl woke up in the cellar after a car accident, at which point her eerie companion tells her a nuclear attack has devastated society. The girl still hopes to escape.”
That’s pretty similar to the finished film, and althoughMary Elizabeth Winstead’s character isn’t a teenager, she still wants to escape, especially because the caretaker, Howard (John Goodman), is creepy and dangerous.
[Spoilers ahead for10 Cloverfield Lane]
The Film Stageoutlined major changes between the finished film and the script. They state that the basic premise—girl wakes up in an underground shelter after a man says there’s been an attack outside, and there’s also a third guy with them. When it comes to the ending, here’s how they breakdown the differences:
The movie ends with something out of the farmhouse scene in Spielberg’sWar of the Worlds, with Michelle escaping from Howard and getting outside of the shelter, only to find that aliens have invaded and are hunting people. She must outwit a worm-like attack dog and then do exactly what Tom Cruise did inWar of the Worlds, introducing an explosive device into a biological looking orifice on an alien craft to escape from its massive tentacles. Then, after all of this, she embarks to Houston to kick some alien ass, in a “the battle is over, let’s fight the war” kind of ending cribbed fromBattle: Los Angeles. In the last shot, flashes of lightning reveal alien ships in the distance, indicating the film-long struggle we just witnessed is comparatively minuscule.
In the original script, Michelle escapes the shelter and is chased through the farmhouse by Howard, who still wants to “protect” her. She blinds him with bathroom cleaner, he tells her about his tragic life (dead wife, missing daughter, treacherous Nate, etc.), and then she shoots him in the kneecap and runs away. He ends the movie alive, entreating Michelle to “be careful.” Later, after traveling down empty roads and finding no one around to help her, she crests a hill and sees the Chicago skyline, smoldering and destroyed. No explanation is given. We don’t even know what she will do next, only that she now knows that Howard, for all his oddity, was correct. The final line in the script is, “She slowly pulls down the mask on the hazmat suit before taking a breath.” So if you thought ,“Hey! The introduction of these aliens feels kind of forced!” it’s because it kind of was (it doesn’t help that it’s accompanied by such a jarring tonal shift). However, the addition of aliens sounds like it came from Damien Chazelle (the “and” credit on the screenplay, For his part, directorDan Trachtenbergtells/Filmthat the reshoots weren’t to make it more “Cloverfield”:
“No, the movie you watch today is very much the movie that I read when I first read the script. The only things that I wanted to do when I came on board was, the script was very intense but I thought it could use some levity. I thought if we could laugh with these characters we would be more bonded to them so when bad stuff would happen it would matter more. And we adjusted some of Michelle’s story, the personal part where she talks about where she is headed to. But the beginning middle and end of it was all there in the first script that I read.”
It’s always tough to know where the truth lies in between all the rewrites and reshoots, but I think the film speaks for itself that theCloverfieldelement feels like something that was tacked on rather than integrated organically or originally intended. Whether you think the movie works better or worse because of its introduction is up to you.
