I may or may not be an outlier these days. At least something of one. I watched this year’s Super Bowl with my family (little River tucked almost too comfortably between my brother and myself on the couch), had a good time. Thing is, I don’t pay much attention to either the halftime show or the commercials. I mean, this is just like any other football game, so these bits of non-playing time might as well be dead air, an excuse to get up, use the bathroom, catch up with your friends, cook something, what-have-you. So it came as something of a surprise when, after the game, I heard of a new Cloverfield movie trailer. Hm, musta missed it, thought I. Immediately thereafter, I heard it was already available to watch on Netflix. Oh, okay then. Shit, I’m behind.
And that feeling would reappear while watching the movie, too…
The plot follows the crew of a space station as they develop a power source to alleviate the societal ills caused by the planet’s running out of fossil fuels (and the global political structure’s inability to adapt to that inevitability, a facet that is treated incredibly shallowly by the script, but that’s a whole ‘nother rant). When they hit a technical snag with the generator, they find themselves entangled in a complicated situation involving parallel dimensions and whatnot.
Now, much like 10 Cloverfield Lane, this script was not originally meant to be taken as part of the Cloverfield universe, and it kinda shows, as the connection is clearly tenuous, tacked-on, and strangely focused-on when possible. But where the former film was just a damn solid psychological thriller that then dovetailed into Cloverfield craziness, this one fails all over the place.
Let’s start with what should have been the strongest point: the cast. We’ve got another strong ensemble here, featuring David Oyewolo, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, my man Daniel Brühl (who’s finally able to actually be Germanic in an American production), Elizabeth Debicki, Ziyi Zhang, Chris O’Dowd, and John Ortiz. And, for the most part, the actors all do well with what little they are given.
But that’s the problem: they aren’t given much to do. There is precious little initial characterization provided us, and once the plot gets going, any bit of character is pretty much dropped in favor of them being human-shaped animated props to keep things moving along. Pretty much everyone is wasted, especially Ortiz, who’s barely given anything to do or say throughout. And this wouldn’t necessarily be too much of an issue if the story were strong. And, of course, it isn’t.
While there is much to be said for the brain-warping power of a parallel universes plot, especially one focused on the intense isolation of outer space (see Event Horizon and Solaris for some more successful endeavors into this territory), this film gets bogged down in trying too many things in too many tones to work, and then gets even more tangled up when trying to crowbar in some extra connections to Cloverfield. At various points, strange things happen, including pieces of the ship popping up inside of crew members, crew members getting basically sucked into the ship itself, parallel timelines collide, and all the while the crew continuously tries to explain things, not to each other, but to us. And it all just comes off as ludicrous and meaningless. There is only a tenuous understanding of the science at work to begin with, and then it’s communicated to us even more clunkily, all too quickly and too often for us to get a handle on anything. On several occasions, I had to furl my brow and try to remember if certain plot points and/or character motivations had been properly set up or even mentioned before (most glaringly Mbatha-Raw’s family issues, which I swear I somehow missed before they were drudged up and made to be her new primary motivation for the final act).
Worsening things is the overall cheapness of the proceedings. Sure, this is a straight-to-Netflix feature, but plenty of the platform’s programming, including its original works, looks like it could have been spawned elsewhere. This film, on the other hand, constantly comes across looking like a lost made-for-TV movie. The camera is a standard digital block that adds nothing to the bland cinematography, the set design and lighting look like an odd Star Trek knock-off series, and while some of the visual effects actually look pretty good, it’s all undercut by a rote editing technique that further dilutes any sense of style the film could have had. Think back to the frantic shaky camera of Cloverfield and the tension and drama of 10 Cloverfield Lane, and the sheer lack of any pop or bit of interest coming from the look of The Cloverfield Paradox is all the more apparent and depressing.
What it all comes down to is that this was a misfire in this burgeoning franchise. Rather than waiting for the later entries to go into shoddy straight-to-video territory (I mean, the fourth entry in the Dragonheart series and the tenth installment of the Hellraiser franchise are this film’s contemporaries), we get a squeezed-out third entry clunker that kicks things off in the home-viewing arena. And it certainly looks like it belongs there, especially if we take the usually denigrating view of the distribution method. It’s cheap, it’s a waste of its resources, and it tries too hard to explain anything and everything as soon as possible. I guess we really didn’t learn from The Phantom Menace, did we? This thing is definitely pass-worthy, but if you like the actors involved, are intrigued by the concept, or are just morbidly curious, at least you won’t haveta to leave the house or spend extra money to watch it, so there’s that.
Allusions of Grandeur 