 It's Cloverfield vs. a repurposed thriller vs. a repurposed piece of shit on movie feuds. Cloverfield first hit in 2008, there was a lot of speculation going in about what this movie actually was. The cast was relatively unknown as well, which helped sell the found footage style approach director Matt Reeves took. Lizzie Kaplan being one of the bigger roles attached at the time. She played Marlena, the most level headed out of these idiot teenagers. TJ Miller is a pretty big star today, but in this film he was relegated to the camera operator. His character Hud runs around documenting his friends for the majority of the picture and he's easily the most likable of this cast. Typically I can't stand rich one dimensional characters, but it somehow works here. Mainly because it's less focused on them and more on the cast they're surrounded in. Reeves follows the Spielberg Jaws playbook. Keep your creature close, but out of sight most of the time until that final act reveal. And much like Jaws, the reveal is a bit silly looking up close, but still equally as awesome. Ten Cloverfield Lane has a very small, but very great cast. Mary Elizabeth Winstead shows her acting range playing a car crash victim turned prisoner named Michelle. Then there's John Goodman who absolutely owns this movie as her unhinged captor Howard. John Gallagher Jr. plays Third Wheel as Emmett. He provides a light bit of comic relief in this otherwise very grim picture. Last and certainly least is the Cloverfield Paradox. The bulk of the film focuses on the crew of a ship trying to solve an energy crisis on Earth. I can't remember the name of the ship, they say it a couple times, but it launches from the Cloverfield station. The only concrete reference is in a TV interview with the author of the book titled The Cloverfield Paradox. The crew is made up of your typical cliches with their most identical characteristic being the flag attached to their shirt. There's the smartmouth Irishman who tells jokes even when being bizarrely de-armed. There's the intelligent Asian woman, the sketchy Russian, and a few more. I think the American astronaut's Hamilton is supposed to be the lead, but she's forgotten halfway through the film and then reintroduced later on. It's like the movie lost interest in her, but then was like, oh shit, we don't really have a protagonist. Let's bring her back. It's also worth noting that this team is impressively incompetent. They make the alien covenant dipshits seem like incredible astronauts. The doctor doesn't like to doctor. Hamilton seems to just roll with whatever task she's given at the moment. One guy just keeps patching random leaks around the ship with this special foam. It's cool the first three times, but upon viewing 17 more, it gets a little old. There's a second focus on Hamilton's husband, Michael, back on Earth. These clearly were shot after the movie was done to tie into Cloverfield a bit more. It doesn't work at all. He's on the phone for the majority of his time on screen. It's super uninteresting. There's a moment where Michael witnesses a massive lumbering creature in the distance and his reaction is absolutely blank slate. He then sees a girl crying out for help. His reaction is exactly the same. Nothing. It is the same reaction I had while sitting here watching this for an hour and 45 minutes. The biggest stories are the antics and behind the scenes marketing that went into these films. The 2008 monster movie was codamed Cloverfield by producer JJ Abrams. They eventually rolled with this title and made the top secret files the government had Cloverfield. The whole viral marketing campaign featured cryptic websites, photo leaks, clever commercial spots, and a multitude of other unconventional ideas at the time. It basically took the Blair Witch Project starter kit and ran wild. The mystery of what the movie was even about was the big draw to see it. And I wasn't disappointed with the final product. After 20 or so minutes of uninteresting patting, heads start to roll. Literally, the head of the Statue of Liberty rolls down the street. On a side note, I hate using the word literally. I used to enjoy it a lot years ago, before it was abused more than the human brain by Flat Earthers. But it's at a point now where I feel gross for even saying it. But here we are. It was refreshing to see the destruction of the city through the lens of one person's camera. It gave a level of scale to everything and perfectly captured the chaos involved in such an attack. The movie stays mysterious from beginning to end, keeping you in the dark, making you have to rewatch to get some of those snippets and Easter eggs. Newspaper articles, TV reports, passing conversations, and clever background events make second, third, and fourth viewings just as fun as the first. With a meager $25 million budget and a box office pull of over $170 million, a sequel seemed inevitable. A sequel that would never come. And these two other movies that have Cloverfield in the title, those are not sequels. Let's not confuse things. Ten Cloverfield Lane was released in 2016, but started out as an entirely different film with multiple titles, such as Valencia and The Cellar. When I read that JJ wanted to take this shot and shelved film and reset it in the Cloverfield universe and gave a heavy sigh of disappointment. I thought Cloverfield earned a sequel, a true sequel, that had writers sit down and think of interesting ways to tell another tale. Not just say, how are we going to sell this decent movie that's going to come out during all these other huge blockbusters? We got to do something with it. I have an idea. Let's tack this on. Nevertheless, I went in with an open mind and I left with my fear coming true. Ten Cloverfield Lane was a perfectly fine thriller that unfortunately had to have some Cloverfield stuff tacked on. The final 15 minutes was completely out of place and tarnishes an otherwise great standalone story. Michelle spends most of the runtime getting to know her captor and what his endgame is. Supposedly the outside world has been poisoned by a foreign invader and the fallout shelter Howard built would last for many years. Of course, things are not what they seem and the already sketchy facade on Howard starts to crumble very quickly. It plays with the whole inner versus outer demons and is generally a good film in its own right. I really didn't need the Cloverfield stuff. It doesn't add much depth to any of it. It's just kind of there. That said, there are a couple of interesting nods to the original such as the fact that Howard helped work on the satellite that crashes at Coney Island and there are some tremors and blackouts that take place early on. Cloverfield Paradox is another attempt to do the same thing with much worse results. It was a film that was obviously very far along in development, if not completed, and then was once more J.J. Abrams-ified in the 11th hour. This feels even more forced with the only real ties being some terrible earth stuff and a cringe-worthy final shot. The most interesting thing here is the marketing. It was supposed to be a theatrical release at one point but then became a direct to Netflix with the audience only finding out like two hours ahead of time via the Super Bowl. If only it was worth the two hours of hype I gave it. Everything on the ship is preposterous by nature. The crew does some accidental dimension jumping while attempting to get their energy maker working. This leads to the title Paradox as there's multiple instances of the same thing occupying one space. That can't happen. The problem with this idea is since nothing makes sense there is little consequence or plot to follow. At any given time some sort of contrived convenience can take place. There are multiple side stories that amount to very little or nothing at all such as a girl on earth that's saved. Maybe she's a tie to Cloverfield Lane. Is she Howard's daughter? Don't know. Maybe it was said. I didn't care. The movie is also set in an alternate timeline years ahead of the events from the other two films making any sort of revelation completely pointless as it has no bearing on the other two installments since it once again isn't in the same timeline. Events can be similar but they're still altered. Nobody asked for this. Why did we want a prequel to the original set in the future yet somehow has bearing on the past? God damn it. The big takeaway is that 10 Cloverfield Lane had a simple and interesting premise before the name change. Peridax was bad from the get-go. 2008 holds up in my opinion with some great gritty camera action going on. The shaky stuff can turn people off. I certainly am not a huge fan of it and it can be overbearing at times. It is creative and different all the same. The music is rare but the sound design is executed very well. Missiles whirl past with great effect and the monster sounds are chilling. 10 Cloverfield Lane is a bottle episode. Everything takes place basically inside this one location with only a few minutes outside at the end. There's very little here in terms of spectacle. It's a complete 180 in terms of camera work too. It's tripod heavy with the actor's performances doing the bulk of the work. The aforementioned final act goes completely bonkers with things in the worst way possible. Everybody feels like the actress stepped out of the bunker and into another picture entirely. And to be fair, she pretty much did. Peridax, aka God Particle, is competently shot but feels overall like a rejected episode of Black Mirror. There are a couple shock value moments and one of the crew members gets a really bad case of worms. Outside of that, there's really nothing notable going on. I have very little to say here as I forgot much of what happened almost immediately after the credits started rolling. And apparently there's a fourth Cloverfield already in the works or reportedly shot and done already? I don't know. Anything can be a Cloverfield movie now. This one supposedly set during World War II. They probably shot the whole damn thing and then JJ came in again and goes, yep, let's do this one now. The real shame now is the marketing seems to be more exciting than the final products. I've come up with a few ideas of my own to keep things moving and fresh. Cloverfield 4 will only be available at Blockbuster Video. Cloverfield 5 will be leaked by David Nunes under the hashtag ReleaseTheMonster. Cloverfield 6 is going to be released as an e-book with the narration coming from Chris Farley's unused audio from Shrek. It's going to be reconfigured to work within the Cloverfield universe. It's going to be awful. Cloverfield 7 is going to be a school play at an undisclosed location until 30 minutes before curtain call. C-8, as it's going to be called, will be a theatrical release again running over two hours. An hour and 45 minutes of that will be the monster's point of view under the ocean. Whole thing's going to be black. Cloverfield 9 is going to be a timed exclusive for the PS5 for PlayStation Plus members only. And then finally, we have Cloverfield 10 that was already released in Cloverfield 6. You just need to play that movie in reverse to get the new one. I can't imagine anyone in their right mind picking this third entry as the favorite of the Cloverfield franchise. We're calling it that now. I can however see a case for Cloverfield Lane. It is a good movie, but it's one that's only hampered down by the name instead of benefiting from it. I still revisit my copy of the original every couple years and find one or two little things to smile at. It's not an amazing movie by any means, but it took chances. It had some fun, and it gave people something cool and positive to talk about for once. That's just my hot take. I'd love to hear yours. Leave a comment. Vote for your winner. And remember, this is more than just reviews. This is Movie Feuds. Oh yes, and I almost forgot. Cloverfield 11 will be a tie back into the original Lost franchise, also helmed by JJ Abrams originally. We will see that the Cloverfield monsters nesting ground was the island itself. And in season two in the hatch, the Dharma glyphs, when rearranged, show the new location of the creature under the ocean. It will be completely stupid and nonsensical. Lost apologists will believe this was the idea conceived from day one of the show. Let's go on.