The Future Unleashed Everything

The Cloverfield Paradox is a paradox in and of itself. I could accept the vastly different 10 Cloverfield Lane as part of the franchise, because it was done so well. The Cloverfield Paradox on the other hand, is too convoluted, too confusing, and too overblown. Cloverfield worked as a found footage movie with a lesser known cast and 10 Cloverfield Lane worked as a confined thriller with a smaller respectable cast. The Cloverfield Paradox takes the opposite approach with a bigger cast of relatively well known stars set on a space station.

The international crew of Cloverfield Station consists of: Gugu Mbatha-Raw as a British officer who left her husband back on Earth, David Oyelowo as the American commander, Daniel Brühl as the untrustworthy German physicists, John Ortiz as the Brazilian doctor, Chris O’Dowd as an unfunny Irish engineer comic relief, Aksel Hennie as the untrusting Russian engineer, and Zhang Ziyi as an engineer who only speaks Chinese. Their mission is to activate a particle accelerator called the Shepard in order to end an energy crisis. Earth is shown sporadically, but most of the attention is in space. A lot of bizarre things happen when the Shepard sends the crew to a parallel universe.

That’s when Elizabeth Debicki comes in as a secretly evil Australian engineer. It’s not scary, just very random when people come out of the walls and severed arms move on their own. The Cloverfield connection is so loose that it practically felt like what Prometheus did to the Alien universe. J. J. Abrams once again connected it to a totally unrelated script called God Particle. The only clever thing about the movie was its marketing campaign. A Super Bowl trailer revealed the title and the fact that it would premiere on Netflix immediately after the game. Aside from that, The Cloverfield Paradox may have irreversibly affected the future of the sci-fi franchise.