As soon as the crew turns on the Shepherd Particle Accelerator they know something is terribly wrong, and that’s the least of their worries. Weird, crazy stuff begins to happen aboard The Cloverfield Station and that’s when the film is at its best. You see, ‘The Cloverfield Paradox’ acts as an all-purpose plot insulation, like The Force in the Star Wars prequels [Croshaw]. It gives the filmmakers license to do all sorts of strange things and then blame it on the Paradox, which, clearly, I was more comfortable accepting than many of my fellow critics. The film then plays out like a horror thriller, in which much of the crew is killed off in surprising, silly, or strange ways (except the Captain, whose death is really stupid). It also allows the film to have illogical plot twists that likewise point to the Paradox. Surely this doesn’t make for a coherent narrative, but the film is at its best when it’s a tense thriller, picking off the crew members one by one as they struggle to get home. Speaking of the crew, the cast is pretty solid, with Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Daniel Brühl, and Chris O'Dowd all doing fantastic jobs in spite of the poor script.

The Cloverfield Paradox is, at its core, a B-grade science fiction schlock-fest. Its story and direction are as chaotic and messy as the soft-science Paradox it showcases. The characters, save Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s Ava Hamilton, as well as Chris O’Dowd’s Mundy serving as the comic relief, are poorly defined. Much of the events that happen in the film garner a “What?” or a “Huh?” if you think about them even slightly. As much as I like the film and overlook its use of the Paradox as a crutch, this sentiment doesn’t justify the fact the movie is poorly written with several plot elements and threads left dangling in the air, unexplained. The direction is shoddy and the editing (especially during the action spacewalk sequence) is choppy and disjointed.