I’ll level with you all: I wasn’t in the Cloverfield fandom until last night. I remember watching the first one on a bootleg DVD I borrowed from a friend-of-a-friend’s-brother and I remember liking it. The whole first-person, shaky cam style of filming was all the rage in the early 2000s. It was a fun alien invasion romp mixed with a giant monster movie and thrown into a blender until this weird but kind of cool mockumentary came out the other end. As far as movies like that go, it’s pretty solid.

I hadn’t seen 10 Cloverfield Lane until last night. My friends (and co-writers here at Reel Eternal) had been hounding me to watch it, telling me it’s right up my alley. Why I resisted so much to their pleas, I’ll never know but they where absolutely right. This low-budget tale of the survivors of a would-be apocalypse was everything I love about the genre times ten*! It lends itself to old B-movies of yesteryear, like Vincent Price’s The Last Man on Earth (aka, the superior film version of that story). And knowing that the film was changed to fit into the world of the Cloverfield made this one some sort of quasi-se-in-between-quel that told yet another story of alien invasion but this time on a more uneven, psychological level.

So after I finished gawking at the brilliance of 10 Cloverfield Lane, I was pumped. I was ready for The Cloverfield Paradox. And what I got… was not what I expected.

And I mean that in the best possible way.



Science fiction has been on the up-and-up for the last couple of years, with at least one major Hollywood blockbuster or Netflix original dipping its toes into the genre. Some have been great, works of art. Others, not so much. The Cloverfield Paradox, in my opinion, splits the difference. It’s not high concept but it’s not low tier sci-fi by any means. Honestly, it’s pretty fun. If every film in this franchise is going to dive into a different genre with each new outing, we’re going to see a lot of interesting stuff. Paradox is just the latest in a long line of “crew lost in space and trapped on a deadly space ship” movies, harkening back to films like Event Horizon and Danny Boyle’s criminally underrated Sunshine. But out of the three, Paradox is probably the most fun. It never takes itself too seriously, letting things like a sentient arm roam around and write cryptic messages of impending doom. Sorry but I live for this crap.

Let’s get something straight real quick: I don’t think this is a perfect movie. Paradox has its share of problems. The first ten or fifteen minutes are very exposition heavy, with on the nose dialogue that makes the stakes of the film less than what they should be, opting to tell the audience what the problems are instead of showing us a world in crisis and on the brink of war. There was a better way to create a sense of urgency but the filmmakers opt instead to jump straight into the action, with our crew of brave scientists trying to successfully fire a particle accelerator aboard the Cloverfield space station in order to create unlimited, sustainable energy for a world in crisis. Speaking of the crew, could this be a more generic cast of characters? The actors portraying this crew (among them Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Daniel Bruhl, Ziyi Zhang, Chris O’Dowd, and Elizabeth Debicki to name a few) save themselves from the under written parts they share equally, although a few get a little bit more to work with than others. And the weakest part of the film lies in the decision to tell two separate stories: the main story of Mbatha-Raw’s Hamliton and co. trapped and adrift on Cloverfield station and the B-story of Hamilton’s husband (Roger Davies) left behind on Earth to deal with the fallout of the station’s successful test of the accelerator. While Davies brings a solid performance, there’s not much for him to do or work with as he drives around a non-descript city in the midst of… some sort of crisis. It’s kind of a bummer, especially off of the heels of 10 Cloverfield Lane, a claustrophobic, minimalistic drama that had no reason to rock as much as it does. Paradox suffers from a problem most franchises have of feeling the need to up the ante every time. Stories don’t work like that. To paraphrase the late Han Solo, “That’s not how stories work”. The stakes don’t need to constantly get higher and higher. Just make me care about a character with stakes that matter to them and then put them through the interstellar ringer.



Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about that severed sentient arm! Out of the three films in this franchise, Paradox is actually the most fun. After a weird interview with a theorist (played by Donal Logue) that explains how firing the accelerator will rip open the spacetime continuum and unleash chaos upon the world, the fun really starts. Is the interview heavy-handed? Oh yeah. Does it bother me? Nope! Again, this movie doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s got Cloverfield in the damn title! I’m not expecting high art or whatever people are calling crap made by people named Nolan and Aronofsky. I wasn’t even expecting a monster movie in space! The genius behind the Cloverfield franchise is that these movies can literally be anything and Paradox is the “haunted house in space” one. Chambers inexplicably flood with water, worms show up in weird places, people end up inside weirder places, parallel timelines intersect and overlap, and, most importantly, severed limbs of crew members become intelligent heralds of chaos**. And all the while our cast of amazing actors sells us that every new crisis is deadly, that every twist is bringing this celestial boat closer to capsizing. By the way, what a boat this is! Making Cloverfield station a mostly practical set was a fantastic idea as it immediately makes the dangers all the more believable. The ship design itself is impressive as the station comes as one of the more interesting designs in recent memory.



I can’t help but think of this as almost a darker episode of some Star Trek prequel series, where the Federation is in its early stages and humanity has yet to boldly go where no man has gone before. Like its predecessors, Paradox lends its concepts to the films of yesteryear, making this more of a modern pulpy sci-fi and I think that was kind of the point. The dramatic elements don’t fall flat, even if they’ve been done better by other films, but I can’t stress enough that this would be right at home in a dime-store paperback or had Roger Corman made it several decades ago.

And that’s where I believe this movie succeeds: it’s exactly what it promised it would be. Donal Logue’s prophecy of chaos came true and this is the after math. Hamilton and co. are put through the cosmic ringer as death and destruction comes to Earth in the form of… well, that’s kind of a BIG spoiler, one that I wasn’t expecting and one that definitely left me with a thirst for more. And with the idea of parallel timelines and other dimensions bleeding into the spacetime continuum, there’s an almost endless list of possibilities where more movies can go.



This movie isn’t going to win any awards. It might not even make it onto anyone’s Top 10 list at the end of the year. But that doesn’t mean it’s a terrible movie, or the worse movie ever made, which seems to be the general consensus here on the internet. To quote my friend and co-writer, “it’s like we missed the meeting where the internet agreed that if something isn’t up its own ass, it isn’t good”. This movie gave me what I wanted and what I wanted was a pulpy sci-fi romp that connected to a universe I never knew I wanted to see more of. Cinematic universes are the new fad these days and I think we could do worse than one for the Cloverfield franchise. I mean, does anyone even remember the dumpster fire that is/was Universal’s Dark Universe? Yeah, give me nineteen more Cloverfields over that any day.

*Get it? See what I did there?

** Honestly, I think this weird arm bit is the best thing to come out of this movie and I’ll fight anyone who tells me otherwise.