‘The Cloverfield Paradox’ Squanders A Thrilling Premiere On A Tepid, Baffling Origin Story

The fact of Netflix’s release strategy for The Cloverfield Paradox is something we’ll be batting around for a while. Was it a successful siege on the Super Bowl attention economy? Was it intended to steal NBC’s thunder for their This Is Us lead-out? Will premiering a new movie on streaming the night of the Super Bowl become the new normal? A lot of that will remain simply debate fodder, as Netflix won’t be releasing hard numbers to back up claims of success for the film’s performance. But, in what is perhaps (sadly) an afterthought, we should probably ask: how good is the actual movie? The answer (equally sadly) is that it’s pretty bad by the standard set by the first two Cloverfield movies, and not that great by regular old sci-fi movie standards either. It’s an origin story that lazily follows the most basic beats of a “ragtag team of scientists in space encounter disaster” movie. It squanders at least two very good performances. It makes very little sense on its own sci-fi terms, and makes even less sense as a Cloverfield prequel. It’s kind of a disaster, and that gives me no pleasure in saying so considering how excited for the continuation of this saga I was.

The history of the Cloverfield movies is one of stealth and sneaky surprise. The first movie — a found-footage disaster drama directed by Matt Reeves that still really holds up — utilized extreme secrecy, to the point of releasing the first trailer without a title attached to it. The second film, 2016’s 10 Cloverfield Lane, was so much a secret Cloverfield movie that it wasn’t even supposed to be a Cloverfield movie until well into the production. But 10 Cloverfield Lane on its own was a tense, claustrophobic little thriller whose internal universe was incredibly well-defined. The Cloverfield tie-ins felt like a bonus (or, if you were feeling less charitable, an unnecessary add-on).

The Cloverfield Paradox sets itself up as a kind of origin story for the Lovecraftian monsters that set upon Earth in the first two films. At the end of the first Cloverfield, you see something fall from space into the ocean, and thus far that’s all we’ve known about the origin of the giant creatures. Paradox pretty much spells out the rest of it in its first half hour, as we join a team of scientists in a space station orbiting Earth. They’re there to experiment with a prototype of a proton collider in the hopes of creating an un-depletable source of energy now that shortages on Earth below have put the planet on the brink of apocalyptic war and destruction. Via a clumsily obvious news report on one of the ship’s TV monitors, we’re told (via a Donal Logue cameo, of all things) that one of the dangers of this collider experiment is that it could, you know, break open all of space-time, opening us up to new dimensions and whatever monstrous creatures lurk therein. Wait a second! I know of some examples of monstrous creatures!

So, yeah, from that moment, you know exactly how the monsters end up on Earth. And hopefully that’s all you were hoping to learn about the giant ravaging creatures, because it’s pretty much all we get. Despite occasional cuts to a character on Earth (the husband of one of the scientists on the station) dealing with the destruction of what I’m just going to call Cloverfield Day, this isn’t a monster movie. Everything else that happens in the film is tangential at best to the origin of the giant monsters. It’s a movie about scientists dealing with … okay, that’s kind of a good question. One of the most frustrating aspects of The Cloverfield Paradox is that the antagonist is … a paradox. It’s a series of scientific impossibilities that get thrown at the crew seemingly at random, and yet inexplicably with an almost intelligent malevolence that makes NO SENSE. After the team fires the collider, weird things start to happen, as a result of fucking up space-time. Objects that were once in drawers are now inside people. People who were once in other dimensions are now inside the walls of the ship. Walls that were once solid and inanimate are now hungry for people-meat. Simple things like water and worms and magnetism have been seemingly zapped by evil magic and start preying upon the scientists. Because … oh, for no reason? Cool.

Picking at the holes in the logic of a sci-fi movie is tedious, unproductive work, and I generally hate doing it, but The Cloverfield Paradox forces one’s hand in this regard so brazenly, it’s impossible not to. First off, the idea of this movie as a prequel to Cloverfield falls apart within the first minutes, as we see scientist Ava Hamilton (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and her husband in a mile-long line for gas. We learn pretty quickly that this is a planet in crisis, to the point where people are stealing energy and the governments of the world are sending an international team up to space to smash protons into each other in order to avert the end of the world. It’s a planet on the brink. It’s decidedly not the world that we saw in the original Cloverfield, which was infused with a very specifically early-2008, pre-financial-crisis spirit of carefree youthful naiveté.

Once space-time goes all screwy on the ship, you’d think that the film would’ve written itself a blank check for weirdness. It’s a literal break in reality! And yet still, somehow, even on those terms, nothing is very believable. And it ends up sabotaging a lot of the film’s genuine strengths. Creepy eyeball weirdness (which had me squirming out of my seat) is undercut by a character communicating with an unseen entity that the film never attempts to explain (worms? the answer is possibly worms?). A standout sequence involving a severed arm is a blast to watch but, again, once you scratch the surface of its internal logic, it falls apart. There’s a version of this movie where the crew descends into a total “Through the Looking Glass” scenario that might actually work, but as it stands, everything that happens only seems to happen because the plot needs to have some kind of crisis, and without any alien entity or artificial intelligence at play, you end up with, say, a deluge of water that seems to have a mind of its own.

This all adds up to a squandering of a pretty fantastic cast. David Oyelowo gets the thankless role of the station’s captain, saddled with the most perfunctory of lines. Daniel Bruhl plays a German scientist, Zhang Ziyi a Chinese particle-collider expert, Chris O’Dowd gets to be the comic relief. Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who was so excellent in the under-appreciated Beyond the Lights, does a great job with the lead role, despite how incredibly tiresome it is to have yet another lady astronaut whose entire motivation for being in space is love and family. Best-in-show honors goes to Elizabeth Debicki, who shows up in a very unexpected fashion and gives the film an infusion of urgency and dynamism. Debicki has proved to be phenomenal at doing this very thing, in films like The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and Guardians of the Galaxy 2. She delivers instant stakes to the film when she arrives, and there’s a glimmer of hope that the film will pivot to a kind of paranoid battle of wills between characters from different dimensions. It doesn’t happen, unfortunately, and Debicki ends up as squandered as the rest, but that moment of hope is among the film’s best.

Among the film’s worst is a closing scene that I’d wager was meant as a kind of cheeky wink to the film many of us may have thought we were getting. You know, the film full of Cloverfield monsters wreaking havoc. That’s not the film I wanted either — we got that film! It was very good! — but after delivering a movie whose logic was so muddled and whose imagination was so hamstrung by tepid characters and nonsensical plotting, that final scene could feel like a real slap in the face. If nothing else, The Cloverfield Paradox is as much a lesson in hubris for J.J. Abrams/Bad Robot as it is for the scientists in the film. You can’t just slap on a bit of branding and retrofit a movie into something more majestic than it was.

Stream The Cloverfield Paradox on Netflix