[For anyone who has not seen 10 Cloverfield Lane, I’ll do my best not to divulge anything too instrumental to the ending or any information that isn’t available or alluded to in the trailer.]

I remember when I first saw the trailer for the movie 10 Cloverfield Lane, and I loved it. It was one of the previews shown in the theater before 13 Hours, director Michael Bay’s latest action bonanza about the Benghazi attack. (Side note: good movie!) When the trailer played, it struck an intriguing chord in me, and it left me, as well as everyone else, with many questions. The trailer can be seen below.

This leaves us, like I said before, with plenty of questions that need to be answered. And this is exactly what trailers are supposed to do! Too often I’ll see a preview in a theater or a “teaser” online, and I essentially have already seen the movie as the three-minute clips shows everything worth seeing. Comedies show their best jokes which become stale by their release date; action movies show their finale, or sometimes even the climactic death of a hero; and horror movies show the monster/spirit/killer in its entirety instead of the leaving the surprise for the theaters that classics like Jaws maintained. Where’s the surprising and authentic experience in the theater when you’ve learned so much of the plot and characters already?

Thankfully, 10 Cloverfield Lane did not fall victim to this. However, the film fell victim to something likely more damaging: the overreaching of producers who saw dollar signs in the franchise craze of modern filmmaking, rather than the originality they could have brought to the screen.

The trailer begins with a pretty upbeat song, people playing board games and putting together puzzles, and there’s even a little bit of dancing. The people seem entertained, if not happy, and the movie seems to be a comedy or at least containing a good dose of humor. As the trailer progresses, however, we see signs that maybe some of the people aren’t as content in the situation as we had once thought. The large man, played by John Goodman, holds a menacing expression on his face and displays the gun on his hip, the girl has her ankle handcuffed to the bed frame and is trying to find a cell phone signal, Goodman is now banging on the table, the room is on fire, the girls is in the ventilation shaft, and there’s a door up some stairs to the daylight. I guess this isn’t going to be as fun of a movie as we thought.

In case you didn’t pick up on the quick glimpses of what is exactly going on in this trailer, I’ll give you a brief setup of what this movie is.

Michelle, a girl in about her early 20s or so, gets in a car crash one night and wakes up in a room with no windows, a brace on her knee, and handcuff keeping her to a bed frame. A large man named Howard opens the door to the room with breakfast and a set of crutches. He’s not going to hurt her like the situation they are in might suggest. Rather, he says he has saved her life. What exactly did he save Michelle from? An attack from alien space worms. No one else was prepared for it and no one else built a bunker like Howard, therefore he says no one else could have survived. Don’t bother calling the police, your parents, or anyone else. He’s convinced of this, and yet we hear a car driving up on the surface. There’s really no point in arguing with Howard, as he holds both a gun and the keys to the door out, therefore putting himself in charge. There’s another person in the bunker as well — a young man named Emmett with a cast and sling on his arm. How did he get it? Howard insists that Emmett did it to himself. Howard soon instructs the two young adults that they will be down here for at least a couple of years and so they must do what he says to survive and maintain the bunker. Michelle does not trust him, and neither do we — not even for a second. As the story continues, we get even more clues that maybe Howard isn’t the sanest nor the best person to be in charge, and it soon leads to Michelle and Emmet’s attempts at escape.

A psychological thriller that is superbly crafted and never lets up on the adrenaline, 10 Cloverfield Lane was one of the best thrillers I have ever seen…. until the last 20 minutes or so. Like I said before, I won’t spoil any endings, but I’ll leave a note that you can choose to do a simple Google search to find the answer. As the name of the movie suggests, this film is in the same universe as 2008’s Cloverfield. Therefore, what is in Cloverfield is what can be found in our ending. This brings us to my issue with the movie, or more specifically, the producers.

Originally, the script for this movie was not going to be related to Cloverfield in any form, and instead would be exactly like I set it up to be: a heart-pounding drama with jumps and great characters. However, in the development stages, the producers, including JJ Abrams, made the decision that linking it to Cloverfield could bring in a bigger box office profit and bring in more revenue. While true in their thinking (they made almost $72 million off a budget of $15 million), I personally disagree with the decision. The only point at which we see a connection between the two films is in the last 20 minutes, and so it looks as if they tacked it in at the last second, which actually isn’t too far from the truth. Also, this ending alters many people’s perceptions of the overall film as it alters the way we see the characters. By connecting it to another film and turning it into a new "cinematic universe", the producers took away a lot of the originality from the story and replaced it with the dollar signs in their eyes.

With that said, this movie is still worth watching, and worth watching it all the way through. The movie, barring the ending, is one of my favorite thrillers (and I’ve seen a lot of them). It’d be a shame for people to miss out on it just because of a happy ending. Also, after watching it, you’ll be able to join in on the conversation!