This article contains Underwater spoilers. Lots of them. You’ve been warned.

If you want to read about the film without any spoilers, read Meagan’s awesome review!

It’s certainly not the first non-Cloverfield movie to have Cloverfield rumors attached to it – Overlord is the most notable recent example of a movie that many believed was part of the ill-defined “Cloverfield Cinematic Universe” but never actually turned out to be – but fans who prowl Reddit/r/Cloververse (that includes yours truly) at least had good reason to question William Eubank’s Underwater and its potential place within that so-called Cloververse. Particularly the fans who simply can’t get enough of Cloverfield‘s massive ARG campaign.

For those who have more productive things to do with their lives (that does not include yours truly), the Cloverfield “Alternate Reality Game” began prior to the release of the J.J. Abrams-produced Cloverfield back in 2008, enriching the storyline present in the film and making strong suggestions about the origin of the movie’s biggie-sized monster – if you want to dive deep, I highly recommend the videos from YouTube’s Inside a Mind. Long story short, the basic gist is that a deep sea drilling mission spear-headed by the mysterious Tagruato Corporation unearthed *something* at the bottom of the sea, and that something emerged in 2008 to wreak havoc across New York City – events documented in Matt Reeves’ found footage film.

A deep sea drilling mission. A monster emerging from the very depths of the ocean. Yeah, that’s pretty much the plot of Underwater, which sees the crew of a deep sea drilling mission fighting for their lives on the bottom of the ocean when monsters emerge from the darkness – a baby monster at first, followed by larger monsters and then ultimately the BIG BOSS MONSTER, a sort of unofficial representation of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu. I immediately dubbed the final boss “Cloverthulhu” in my mind as I stared in awe at his massive form, and the reason for that is because he’s as much Cthulhu as he is a monster that seems to exist within the same world as the “Clovie” beast we met back in 2008. He even has smaller monsters living on his body, and those monsters have spindly limbs that call to mind the general design of Clovie.

In other words, anyone suspecting that Underwater was a top secret Cloverfield film these last few months had damn good reason to at least ask those questions; now that I’ve seen the movie for myself, I’m still not entirely convinced it’s *not* a Cloverfield movie! Mind you, the fact that it was released by 20th Century Fox and has no involvement from J.J Abrams pretty much puts a nail in that coffin, as does the fact that, well, the movie never actually in any way directly announces itself as a Cloverfield movie – I also must note, per our sources, that this movie was apparently never supposed to be a Cloverfield movie at any stage – but the fact remains that it’s almost impossible for Cloverfield fans to watch Underwater and not think of it as the (unofficial) prequel to the 2008 film that we’ve long been waiting for.

Furthermore, what’s kinda crazy about Underwater is that, despite it most definitely not being an official Cloverfield film, it actually feels quite a bit more like a Cloverfield film than any post-Cloverfield movie that actually exists within the franchise’s universe. 10 Cloverfield Lane, while a brilliant sci-fi/thriller in its own right, shared only tangential connections with Cloverfield and certainly didn’t seem to exist within the same world as its 2008 predecessor, establishing that whatever the “Cloverfield Cinematic Universe” actually even is, it’s a very, very loose umbrella under which pretty much any single monster movie (as long as it’s produced by J.J. Abrams) can exist. The movie’s monsters seem to share very little DNA with Clovie, and aside from little winks and nods here and there – John Goodman’s character worked for Tagruato, for example – it’s hardly discernible as being a film that shares any tangible connection to Cloverfield.

Netflix’s The Cloverfield Paradox muddied the waters even further and pretty much killed my own interest in whatever the hell the Cloverfield Universe is trying to be, bringing a cop-out explanation into the fold by letting us know that a space-time rift in the future unleashed different monsters in different timelines; in other words, Cloverfield and 10 Cloverfield Lane each exist in their own timelines, and the outer space-set The Cloverfield Paradox is the movie that explains how all this madness began. I guess. Sure. Again, aside from a brief appearance by Clovie that was tacked onto the very end of the movie, Cloverfield Paradox was hardly satisfying as a supposed Cloverfield movie, and it became crystal clear that the approach from Abrams and Bad Robot was to only ever use the Cloverfield umbrella as a means to cleverly retro-fit original monster movies into more attention-grabbing packaging.

But Underwater is the complete opposite: a movie that in almost every way seems to be a Cloverfield movie but was never actually turned into one. Again, there was an entirely different team behind this year’s aquatic horror gem – interesting to note, it being released by 20th Century Fox in the year 2020 makes it a Disney movie! – and despite seemingly intentional references to the Cloververse (including the casting of both T.J. Miller and John Gallagher, Jr., two Cloverse veterans who kinda can’t be playing their Cloverse characters in this one), it again must be noted that it is absolutely 100% *not* a Cloverfield movie in any way. But the fact remains that it *feels* like a direct adaptation of Cloverfield‘s ARG campaign, so much so that it’s kind of a bummer that it’s not actually a part of the universe. Very little rewriting – arguably none at all – could’ve easily made this a wholly satisfying Cloverfield prequel.

Is it so hard to believe, for example, that another giant monster emerged from the depths sometime after Kristen Stewart blew Cthulhu into pieces at the end of Underwater? After all, the movie’s end credits do establish that the deep sea drilling continued soon thereafter. And is it so hard to believe that this second giant monster emerged in 2008, in New York City?

Even though J.J. Abrams never did get his hands on this one, the fact remains that Underwater is precisely the kind of monster movie we should’ve been getting from the Cloverfield franchise in the wake of the original found footage film. And while I damn sure wouldn’t wish to trade in 10 Cloverfield Lane for anything – I could live without The Cloverfield Paradox, for the record – there’s something to be said for cinematic universe films that actually feel like pieces of a whole. And in the wake of Cloverfield‘s universe being so muddled and unsatisfying in recent years, I can’t help but be a bit bummed that the perfect Cloverfield prequel isn’t one at all.

Underwater is, however, an awesome original monster movie. So go support it. And if you’re interested in reading my further thoughts on the movie, you’ll find my review on Twitter.