The lost art of movie surprises
In an industry devoid of surprise, one filmmaker hinges his entire career to a “mystery box.”
Blockbuster director and producer J.J. Abrams isn’t exactly a trailblazer when it comes to storytelling, but he’s one of the few who still believes in the discovery of the moviegoing experience.
The Abrams name is a big selling point for this week’s “10 Cloverfield Lane,” a movie from his Bad Robot production company with a slight affiliation to 2008’s found-footage monster movie, “Cloverfield.”
Abrams only serves as a producer on “10 Cloverfield Lane,” though he’s still riding the uber-success of his last directorial effort, a little movie called “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.”
Even considering the high stakes, it wasn’t surprising to see Disney entrust Abrams with the “Star Wars” franchise. In addition to a couple of competent blockbusters on his resume (“Super 8,” the third “Mission: Impossible” film), Abrams essentially designed his two recent “Star Trek” movies to feel more like George Lucas than Gene Roddenberry.
Moreover, Disney knew Abrams was good at keeping secrets. An Abrams-style marketing push would build the kind of anticipation necessary to offset any bad taste still lingering from the prequel films. Even if “The Force Awakens” disappointed, keeping certain aspects of the story a mystery all but guaranteed two weeks of box office domination.
As it turned out, the film’s marketing campaign was so good, it even stopped those spoiler-hungry trolls on the Internet from ruining “Star Wars” for the rest of us.
Given how familiar “The Force Awakens” ultimately is to the original “Star Wars” trilogy, it almost seems irrelevant now to praise the film’s cagey marketing. The surprises of “The Force Awakens” aren’t especially shocking to anyone well-versed in the original trilogy’s story construction.
Still, most people got to experience “The Force Awakens” as something unsoured by the Internet beforehand. That’s incredibly rare these days, and you’ve got to give Abrams a lot of the credit for keeping the lid on until Dec. 18.
Many of Abrams’ notable successes have been marketed in similar, cryptic ways. The television series “Lost,” co-created by Abrams, is hours and hours of mysteries stacked on mysteries, to the point where many viewers eventually stopped caring about the answers.
One of the best examples is the Abrams-produced “Cloverfield,” which arrived practically out of nowhere back in January 2008. The film’s first teaser, featuring the poor, severed head of Lady Liberty, was all audiences needed to see in order to get excited about it, and subsequent marketing kept the monster unseen. The movie itself was a bit of a tease, relying on a found-footage gimmick to hide the monster from sight for most of the movie.
The newest piece of the Abrams mystery puzzle is “10 Cloverfield Lane,” a chamber-thriller about three survivors living in a bunker after an unspecified chemical attack. The film, directed by Dan Trachtenberg, actually has little to do with the original “Cloverfield.” It was conceived as an original script and the filmmakers have said the two films don’t even share a universe, at least for now.
The real connection is the marketing. “10 Cloverfield Lane” even has an extensive Alternative Reality Game (ARG) that uses the Internet and real-life locations and objects to further establish the film’s universe. The last movie to use an ARG so extensively was, you guessed it, “Cloverfield.”
It may be that “10 Cloverfield Lane” is manipulating audiences by teasing something it ultimately won’t deliver. Mystery just for the sake of mystery is not a satisfying storytelling tool, and if the film can’t offer something that connects it to its predecessor (if only thematically), then audiences may reject it.
Luckily, in the case of “10 Cloverfield Lane,” reviews suggest the film is narratively more satisfying than the sometimes-gimmick-laden “Cloverfield.”
The hope is, like many of Abrams’ projects, the tease will be worth the discovery of a satisfying, and unspoiled, moviegoing experience. More filmmakers and studios should follow the model, especially when two-minute trailers often summarize 90 percent of a two-hour movie. At this point, is there anything we don’t already know about “Batman vs. Superman?”
I suppose we should just be happy any of us can sit through an entire movie without being distracted by other media. Even if opening the mystery box ultimately proves unsatisfying, the time spent experiencing it will be more worthwhile than scrolling through post after post of political rants and cat pictures on social media.
Tyler Wilson can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com.