There be no shelter here.

The front line is everywhere with the movie 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016). I had heard there was a twist to this movie although I didn't feel very surprised by much in the movie.

This movie succeeds in a few ways, it pokes at preppers in an insightful way, has excellent actors who aren't often showcased, and plays with a bomb shelter story in an interesting and unexpectedly twisty drama. There have been a few good bomb shelter depictions involving preppers that I have seen including Take Shelter, and a story line in a later season of Six Feet Under and gladly this movie gives a little different angle at it.

It fails by making the movie hinge on the main mystery of "what's going on outside" yet the marketing team shows the imagery of the threat in the Super Bowl commercial for the movie. I went back to see which trailer gives the ending away and found another theater trailer that is actually very well put together that focuses on the montage in the middle of the movie but then shows absolutely everything that happens in the movie. I'm glad I didn't see the longer trailer because it would have taken away any sense of suspense.

I like what I saw in the writing and directing of this movie but I don't think it reaches the level of drama and suspense of Take Shelter, even though that movie ends before the threat takes hold, and it probably would have achieved more mystery by not having it even loosely tied to the movie Cloverfield even if it is just a common name. I think this movie would have succeed more with another name, by expanding the time period underground trying to fill time, and if it found a cleaner way to explain that they could go up into the house, but they still had to live below ground.