10 Cloverfield Lane Trailer Breakdown: 15 Clues You Need To See

For years people have been speculating about a Cloverfield sequel. Where did the monster come from? Was it killed at the end? How did Rob and Beth's Coney Island date end? These were lingering questions that begged answers in some form. Probably a new found footage movie from the point of view of the military, or perhaps that guy on the Brooklyn Bridge we see for a second shooting another, equally exciting document of the monster's attack. But, after eight years of silence, any follow-up looked dead in the oily water; director Matt Reeves moved on to the Planet Of The Apes and J.J. Abrams, well, did Star Wars. But no - in a move more audacious than the title-less reveal of the original, we've just learned that not only does a new movie exist, titled 10 Cloverfield Lane and directed by first-time feature filmmaker Dan Trachtenberg, but it's already got a trailer and is going to be hitting cinemas in less than two months. Suck it spoiler brigade. Although the announcement of a Cloverfield "sequel" is a big shock, the project itself has actually been known for a while, originally under the working title Valencia. Being a Bad Robot production, little was known about what it entailed, although here's a very vague plot synopsis (care of SlashFilm) that consolidates a lot of what you see in the trailer:

"The majority of the movie takes place in an underground cellar, and revolves around a young woman who wakes up in the cellar after a severe car accident and fears she has been abducted. Her captor, a doomsday prepper, tells her he saved her life and that there has been a terrible chemical attack that has left the outside uninhabitable. She does not know what to believe and as tensions rise, she decides she must escape, regardless of the terrors that await outside."

The only other word we have on the movie (Paramount appear to have just dropped the movie without any fanfare, as with the original 1-18-08 letting the fans build up the hype) came from J.J. Abrams speaking to Collider:

"The idea came up a long time ago during production. We wanted to make it a blood relative of Cloverfield. The idea was developed over time. We wanted to hold back the title for as long as possible."

This suggests that the movie wasn't originally conceived as a Cloverfield sequel, but instead evolved into "a blood relative" during development, meaning that while there's a connection, this isn't going to an answer-filled direct sequel. Of course, that "blood relative" quote (which has echoes of Ridley Scott's "Alien DNA" comment about Prometheus) keeps things really vague. So, in the absence of concrete facts, what can we learn from the trailer about the movie, its story and how it relates to Cloverfield? Let's break it down.