Fan Theory: The Cloverfield Connection

If you have not seen the J.J. Abrams films Super 8, Cloverfield, or 10 Cloverfield Lane, please stop reading this now.  I am about to connect the three films together in a way that you may not have considered.

That being said…

I love J.J. Abrams films.

Abrams creates films that interest me, but even though he has re-made or continued two of my favorite  franchises of late which have consumed most of his time, his side projects are the ones that interest me the most.

The three films listed above are connected, and I’m about to prove this through a very lengthy post, so hold on.

The premise: The events of the film Super 8, particularly the mis-treatment of the alien subject in the film and his/her subsequent escape started an intergalactic war with an alliance of beings that use creatures from their own planet or planets as weapons against their enemies as seen in Cloverfield and 10 Cloverfield Lane.

Evidence:

1. Similarity of Alien Anatomy – If we look at the alien in Super 8 and compare it to the anatomy of both the giant creature in Cloverfield along with the “parasites” that attack the protagonists in the subway we see that they all have a similar anatomy.
   

   

   

   As we can see, these creatures all have multiple appendages, a single head with sharp teeth in an articulating jaw, and move about using all of these appendages.  It would stand to reason that they all come from the same planet (or at least have the same creature designer).  However, creature designer aside, the creature design is overseen by Abrams, so the creatures must all look similar for a reason.

2. Prolonged Torture/Experimentation – The original mission of the alien from Super 8 is not known, but the fact remains that our government tortured this creature for many years, experimenting on it relentlessly, and when it escapes it sees fit to use humans for food and to promptly build a spacecraft to escape our world, probably realizing that it was outnumbered.  It would see humans as hostile.  The only reason it spares the children in the film is because it had telepathic abilities and was able to see that one or two of them were benevolent.  It would probably not be able to forget the majority of its stay on our planet, and that was a time filled with the horrors of torture and experimentation.
3. The Cloverfield Monster Is Extraterrestrial – As seen in the screenshot below, at the end of the film something large falls from the sky and collides with the water in the distance on the found footage of the protagonist’s trip to Coney Island.  The object flies into the shot and strikes the water far away, and this is before the events in New York City as the main story is a re-recording over the Coney Island experience.  What if the events in Cloverfield are the first wave of an attack by a race of aliens that use their own wildlife to attack other planets.  The Cloverfield Monster probably lives a happy and normal life on its own planet, surrounded by its natural habitat, but when we plop it down in New York he is simply trying to defend itself from missile and machine gun attack.  What if we could win a war by releasing one animal into a city, an animal that is to us very mundane and ordinary?
4. An Alliance of Aliens – The aliens in 10 Cloverfield Lane are not similar in anatomy to the creatures in the other two films, but what if these are creatures in alliance with the Super 8 alien race who belong to some type of federation of alien species?  The larger monsters would be released on the cities while the aliens encased in the flying ships along with their “attack dogs” roam the countryside to mop up all the other humans living in out-lying areas.  In 10 Cloverfield Lane, Emmett mentions seeing a massive explosion from far away which could be one of the larger monsters attacking a nearby city, or it could be the nukes dropped on the original Cloverfield Monster.  Also, at the end of the film a woman broadcasts over the radio that they have defeated the aliens in Houston and are mounting a resistance.

It is hoped that one can see the connections here, even if they might be untrue according to Abrams himself, but then Tolkien apparently never intended The Lord of the Rings to be a Christian allegory either.  Abrams does say that there are “connections” with the 2008 film that war not “obvious”.  I simply see a plot thread that I have hopefully explained well enough to be plausible.