Dan Trachtenberg
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Goodman’s performance lulls you into a false sense of security with his endearing teddy bear demeanour (still in currency from his Rosanne days) that cracks during fits of rage to reveal a frightening villain channeling a little of Kathy Bates’ Annie Wilkes from Misery but with less sadism.
No, you should stay focused on the matter at hand: a masterfully suspenseful mystery thriller set in a doomsday bunker, with a story that conjures “Misery,” “Alien,” “The Twilight Zone,” several Steven Spielberg movies, and at least one episode of “Breaking Bad.” (YOU’LL KNOW THE ONE.) Directed with astonishing confidence by first-timer Dan Trachtenberg, the film uses a deceptively simple premise, carefully scripted (by Josh Campbell, Matthew Stuecken, and Damien Chazelle) so that no information is wasted and each new piece of it furthers the mystery.
At different times during its 105 minutes, "10 Cloverfield" recalls H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds," Stephen King's "Misery" and Steven Spielberg's "Jaws."
One moment, Goodman is channeling his old playbook while playing every man Dan Conner on Roseanne , the next he’s borrowing plays from Kathy Bates in Misery .
There are shades of Misery here, though Howard’s obsession is not as much with Michelle as it is with the correctness, the prescience, of his own preparedness.
Starting out as a cut-rate Misery , this first feature from Dan Trachtenberg quickly comes to resemble an old Twilight Zone half-hour padded to feature length, partly through a climax that, well, spoilers!
Jaws (1975)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
influenced Prey (2022), 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)
Themes Visuals
At different times during its 105 minutes, "10 Cloverfield" recalls H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds," Stephen King's "Misery" and Steven Spielberg's "Jaws."
In “Prey,” he shows the Predator’s infrared point-of-view juxtaposed with overhead shots of tall grass moving in a field, a reminder that what we can’t see is scarier like “Jaws” (1975).
Cinematographer Jeff Cutter gorgeously and harrowingly accents predatory instincts reminiscent to Jaws, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and—picturesquely—the live-action The Lion King.
It’s a lesson that Steven Spielberg learned in making Jaws, and Trachtenberg paid attention.
But in general, the tone is a throwback to many of the old school kind of thrillers that took larger-than-life concepts and fears, and grounded them in a cynical psychology; films like Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach where most of the world ended in nuclear explosion, yet Australians are forced to quizzically carry on as if nothing happened while radioactive fallout inches closer every passing week.
Michelle is on the highway, fleeing her normal life in a sequence that, in its tone and scoring, recalls the opening scenes of Psycho — and turns out to be as much of a red herring.
These opening scenes are clearly designed to be reminiscent of another story of a woman who left the city for a dangerous countryside, as Michelle packing her bags and Bear McCreary’s overheated, Hermann-esque score will make anyone who’s seen "Psycho" think of Marion Crane in the opening act of Hitchcock's classic.
In an opening sequence that eerily echoes Marion Crane’s flight from justice in “Psycho,” an emotionally distraught Louisiana woman named Michelle (Winstead) packs her bags and drives out into the night.
Her trip has a whiff of Janet Leigh busting out of town in Psycho .
She's not the overpowered, muscle-bound hero that we've seen in past Predator movies; instead, Prey presents Naru as a strong female lead with the same assurance of Ripley from the beloved Alien franchise, combining strength, determination, and intelligence into an underdog character with everything to prove.
Three sequels and two crossovers with the Alien franchise later, 20th Century Studios is giving us our first prequel to the series in Prey.
The spiritual sequel to "Cloverfield" has been shrouded in mystery, but can the final product live up to the hype?
While producer J.J. Abrams describes “10 Cloverfield Lane” as being very different but in “the same wheelhouse” as the 2008 film “Cloverfield,” it still needs to be stressed that this intense, continually gripping and extremely engrossing movie is not a sequel to the equally excellent earlier film, also produced by Abrams.
There’s an adequate thriller in “10 Cloverfield Lane” – 60 year-old man saves (or abducts) 30 year-old woman and stashes her in his doomsday shelter, claiming a world-ending chemical attack – but it doesn’t deserve to share a name with 2008 cinematic theme park ride “Cloverfield.”
★★★½ Not so much a sequel as a sidebar to the 2008 "found footage" monster movie "Cloverfield," this ingenious and claustrophobic thriller is compact enough to be almost the movie equivalent of a black box theater production: For most of its length, it needs only three characters and a single location -- a well-stocked survivalist bunker -- to keep audiences on edge.
John Goodman and Mary Elizabeth Winstead in 10 Cloverfield Lane.
The Cloverfield Paradox (2018)
Directed by Julius Onah
influenced by 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016), Prey (2022)
Plot
In 2016, a film initially titled The Cellar got branded 10 Cloverfield Lane and was released to critical plaudits and financial success; the movie had little to do with the original Cloverfield but had the same winking, self-aware approach to sci-fi horror (and the same production team).
A trainwreck of a sci-fi flick bent on extending a franchise that should have died a peaceful death almost exactly one decade ago, Julius Onah's The Cloverfield Paradox follows the lead of the far-superior 10 Cloverfield Lane in imagining a Cloverfield spinoff whose genre ingredients have little to do with the original found-footage, giant-monster flick.
It's a far cry from 2008's fun, inventive Cloverfield and 2016's smart, intense 10 Cloverfield Lane.
But like 10 Cloverfield Lane, the monsters are kind of an afterthought with the meat of the story and conflicts focused elsewhere.
While its predecessors, 2008’s Cloverfield and 2016’s 10 Cloverfield Lane , thrived on pre-release mystery, this was starting to feel less like calculated secrecy and more like a panicked flight.
While 10 Cloverfield Lane left us in the dark throughout the movie, The Cloverfield Paradox continually cuts back to Earth to show us that the monster is there, somewhere, doing something.
Expertly blending action and thriller elements with a superficially absurd sci-fi-horror high concept – a technologically advanced alien big-game hunter stalks American special-forces soldiers for sport – the film ingeniously inverts the right-wing fantasy of Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985).
Knock at the Cabin (2023)
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
influenced by 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)
Themes
It’s weird, traumatic, and violent, borrowing ideas from “Knowing,” “10 Cloverfield Lane,” and “The Mist” as it explores thought-provoking themes of destruction, salvation, and sacrifice.
That allowed the story to stand more on its own than exist solely as a Shyamalan property, hitting a balance between Funny Games (2007) and 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016), particularly the latter in the big question of “Are these people full of shit?
Knock at the Cabin felt a lot like 10 Cloverfield Lane , since both were claustrophobic, locked-room films with an apocalyptic edge.
A guilty part of us might hope that this turns into Don’t Look Up or even Roland Emmerich’s 2012 , or even 10 Cloverfield Lane which used a similar sense of claustrophobia and guesswork.
*** It’s tempting to call Prey a “back to basics” entry in the Predator franchise, but it’s more of a prodigal return to a theme only implied in the steroidal, beautifully plot-light 1987 original starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Why? It’s another attempt to resurrect the Predator franchise, a series that started with brawny, two-fisted pugnaciousness in 1987 with John McTiernan ( Die Hard ) at the helm and star Arnold Schwarzenegger leading the way, only to be followed up by a series of sequels and spinoffs of varying quality, including 2004’s Alien vs. Predator , 2010’s Predators , and 2018’s The Predator .
Little does she know that the prey she's stalking is actually looking for a hunter to match its own skill (the Predator, obviously), leading to a vicious showdown between the two.
While the Predator films are far from being horror’s most inconsistent franchise (the Hellraiser films take that crown), the idea of a new Predator film in 2022 doesn’t necessarily inspire confidence.
The third act, when the film becomes the inevitable, rushed series of original Predator homages, is pretty good but never adds up for Midthunder.
Hunt or be hunted, says the new “Predator” prequel film, “Prey,” but don’t underestimate the threat level either, the movie often reminds us.
Esoterically and ambiguously mentioned earlier that 10 Cloverfield Lane borrows much from Hitchcock, the one movie that almost immediately comes to mind is The Birds .
With her commanding screen presence, Midthunder spends much of the movie in natural landscapes, accompanied only by her character’s rather adorable dog, Sarii—and the combination of hero-and-dog versus aliens recalls a similar dynamic in Riddick (2013).
In a moment when unpretentious genre-savvy craftsmen like David Twohy have receded from view, Trachtenberg, whose background is in commercial and video-game work, has similar gifts: At times, Prey displays some of the same ornery virtuosity as Twohy’s Riddick films, especially the underrated 2013 third installment, with its mostly dialogue-free opening passages pitting Vin Diesel’s loner against a host of carnivorous monsters.
It will remind the savvy cinephile of works such as Wait Until Dark and Rope , the single setting used to evoke as much fear and horror as the potential apocalypse promised outside.
Just when I thought the Predator series was over for good, thanks to the god-awful abomination of Shane Black’s The Predator four years ago, the Disney-owned Fox studio refused to give up after all.
First, one needs to keep it high-concept, which most do (aside from Shane Black’s The Predator , which I still find pretty entertaining despite myself).
It's a coming-of-age period piece with shades of Mel Gibson's Apocalypto ; what I'm saying is it means business.
This is more of a small cousin to “Apocalypto,” in that the action (and by the middle it’s all action) takes place purely within a Native American world.
There are many similarities between Prey and Apocalypto, but Prey stands on its own due to its sharp storytelling and uber-strong performance from Midthunder.
It feels a little bit like a blend of the Predator franchise and both The Revenant and Apocalypto .
I was very inspired by Mad Max: Fury Road for finally throwing the gauntlet down and saying, ‘You can make a movie that is all action and it still be a great film.’
To be honest, a lot of this movie reminded me of Mad Max: Fury Road .
It's even more telling that Prey is actually really good - easily the best Predator sequel and perhaps one of the most beautiful action films to be released by a major studio since maybe Mad Max: Fury Road.
Prey isn’t going to blow the roof off of the Oscars like Mad Max: Fury Road or Avatar , but dear god there is something to be said for a franchise film uninterested in a larger universe, existing solely for the sake of entertainment, and actually putting effort into it as opposed to just writing it off as “dumb fun” to excuse being lazy.
The Matrix Reloaded (2003)
Directed by Lilly Wachowski
influenced Predator: Killer of Killers (2025)
Much like The Animatrix, the 2003 tie-in that the Wachowskis released alongside The Matrix Reloaded, Predator: Killer Of Killers serves as a kind of animated anthology precursor to Predator: Badlands, Trachtenberg’s next live-action theatrical film, due later this year.
For contrast, the characters in the similarly claustrophobic 10 Cloverfield Lane were (fairly) normal people with lived experiences that they brought with them into John Goodman’s happy-fun-time bunker.
Not only is Alien an obvious touchstone for this sci-fi saga, but so too are The Terminator , Ex Machina , 10 Cloverfield Lane and Moon , among numerous other tales about solitary figures trapped in mysterious bunkers or facilities.
It’s the “robots with feelings” aspect of I, Robot crossed with the contained nature of 10 Cloverfield Lane — it just falls short of either.
It’s not a serious drama or even cultural exploration like Salvador Carrasco’s “The Other Conquest,” or even “Dances with Wolves.”
Why? It’s another attempt to resurrect the Predator franchise, a series that started with brawny, two-fisted pugnaciousness in 1987 with John McTiernan ( Die Hard ) at the helm and star Arnold Schwarzenegger leading the way, only to be followed up by a series of sequels and spinoffs of varying quality, including 2004’s Alien vs. Predator , 2010’s Predators , and 2018’s The Predator .
Unlike nearly all of those films (with the possible exception of 2010’s Predators ), Prey takes a different angle on the human-Predator dynamic — one that more closely echoes that of the original film.