Illustration by Kai Henthorn-Iwane
Since the start, the Cloverfield franchise has been a mystery. The first movies trailers revealed no information for months. The second movies’ first trailer was released two months before it came out. And then during the 2018 Super Bowl, there was a trailer for the newest Cloverfield movie, but the twist was that it was releasing onto Netflix as soon as the game ended.
The Cloverfield Paradox follows the story of scientists on a particle accelerator in space trying to create a new energy source for the world. When something goes wrong, the scientists find that the Earth has disappeared.
This film is a huge mess. While the premise and action is fun, the rest of the movie is not as well done. The plot is generic and all over the place. Instead of an original movie, it feels like the Alien franchise and Event Horizon were smashed together to make a decent Black Mirror episode.
One of the most promising parts of this film is the visuals. The way each scene is lighted adds to the suspense and sucks the audience in. Everything within the space station looked both realistic and futuristic, which helped solidify the world.
Most of the acting is impassioned, but the dialogue is awful. Chris O’Dowd plays the comedy relief character, and most of his jokes are terrible. The only reason they’re remotely funny is because of O’Dowd’s performance. The main character, Ava Hamilton, played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, has the best writing out of the entire cast, but still falls flat. Her motivations are one-dimensional and a lot of the emotional impact of her words isn’t present.
Besides the dialogue, the biggest complaint about this film is that the Cloverfield title was sloppily added onto the movie, and it doesn’t do much for the franchise. While many were disappointed that 10 Cloverfield Lane didn’t tie in to the original Cloverfield, it was still an amazing film. Many others praised the fact that the franchise seemed to be putting unknown directors into the mainstream by putting the Cloverfield name onto their films.
The Cloverfield Paradox does not continue this trend. It tries to connect the franchise as a whole through plot devices that aren’t fully fleshed out. For many the film was more confusing and brought up a lot of new questions instead of answering older ones. What worked about the second Cloverfield movie is that it didn’t have to connect to the original at all, so it could be its own amazing film. The Cloverfield Paradox tries to explain connections between all three movies, but does it in a way that didn’t actually succeed.
This is more of a fault with the marketing rather than the movie. The trailer advertised that The Cloverfield Paradox would explain why the original movie happened, but it doesn’t for much of the audience. This film only explains past questions for the most die hard fans who follow every bit of news and keep track of online marketing campaigns.
The movie doesn’t live up to what the others in the franchise set up. It used a smart marketing technique to bring in a wide audience but failed to provide enough information about the series to keep them engaged. The movie requires a lot of past knowledge about the franchise. While the movie has bits and pieces that are very well done, the bad outweighs the good, especially since it’s so hard to figure out what’s going on. The only people who should watch this are hardcore fans of the franchise or people who are willing to be confused to watch some cool action over a flimsy plot.