"The Cloverfield Paradox" review

Well here's a review I didn't expect to be doing today.

With Netflix’s surprise launch of “The Cloverfield Paradox” by announcement of its debut trailer, JJ Abrams has more or less cemented himself as one of the greatest marketing geniuses of Hollywood almost as surely as this franchise has embraced its identity as a giant science fiction themed troll tactic on fans of speculative fiction that may not necessarily be a bad thing, independent of the quality of the individual films.

The third entry in the franchise sees release 10 years after the original “Cloverfield” and 2 years after 2016’s “10 Cloverfield Lane,” seemingly cementing the series as something of a cinematic counterpart to the science fiction television series anthology made popular by the likes of “The Twilight Zone” and “The Outer Limits” but seeing a recent resurgence with the popularity of “Black Mirror.”

While the 3 films primarily carry self-contained narratives, the first movie being a first person account of a Giant Monster attack on New York City from the perspective of the confused New Yorkers fighting to escape and the second following a woman’s struggle to adapt to the custody of a lunatic doomsday prepper in an underground cellar who despite clearly being mentally unstable may be trying to legitimately protect them from some sort of apocalyptic threat, they’re all bound by certain themes and aesthetics, such as intimate and claustrophobic narrative perspectives and an almost Lovecraftian approach to viewing the horrors the protagonists attempt to survive.

Feeding into the play of minimalistic traits forcing your brain to draw connections with previous movies, “The Cloverfield Paradox” takes place in the near future where an energy crisis puts the fate of humanity in danger of fighting for the remaining stores of what power is left.

The scientist and engineers of Cloverfield Station, home to the most powerful particle accelerator ever made, are tasked with generating a stable reaction out of the equipment, powerful enough to supply the world below with clean and renewable energy to prevent it from tipping over to the brink of disaster.

When the accelerator manages to produce a beam so powerful that it rips through the fabric of space time however, the workers aboard the station are tasked with figuring out exactly what went wrong and how to get back home while simultaneously struggling to survive a station that seems to be almost actively trying to eradicate its crew members through odd psychological manipulation and phenomena defying the laws of physics.

Where “The Cloverfield Paradox” becomes more unique than its immediate predecessor regarding franchise synergy in its explicit use of context clues to set up something of a narrative for the rest of the series, the horror elements of the franchise still feed back into itself for a product that works generally thanks to solid sense of visual direction by Julius Onah, who manages to generate decent tension in a horror environment that theoretically uses sound scientific explanation to define its scary phenomena, and a strong cast of character actors that all seem to consistently be on the cusp of breakout but really do deserve more recognition than they currently have.

They go a long way in injecting their characters with more meat and potatoes that exist on the written page, which brings up the unfortunate crippling flaw of “The Cloverfield Paradox.”

The film seems to almost openly invite outside theory based upon observation of the movie’s numerous elements by long time viewers and that sort of speculation of what this franchise and its elements mean and where it could possibly be going is kind of a huge part of the fun if this individual flick and the series that its associated with, even if it’s not particularly everybody’s cup of tea for reasons I can’t exactly blame its critics for.

However, the franchise’s trademark minimalism, undoubtedly a byproduct of its inaugural entry’s subsequent sequels being independently cannibalized productions with minor connective tissue added in postproduction, don’t quite lend itself as well to this specific installment.

“The Cloverfiel Paradox” still stands passably as a science fiction horror movie in and of itself but were you to strip it of its connection to the meta franchise that has assimilated, it’d ebb more towards the side of mediocrity. The cast certainly brings their A game to the table but the brisk hour and a half run time of the movie could have easily benefitted from an extra 20 minutes or so to beef up their characters or at the very least add a little bit more weight to the journey they all have a stake in seeing through, similar to the slowly burning build up of “Interstellar” or the lighter side moments of “The Martian.”

The extra time spent following the protagonist’s husband down on Earth, reacting to catastrophes that we don’t actually get to see also comes off as a cheap set up to a final visual nod that would have better served the story as a “Planet of the Apes-esque” gut punch of a twist rather than detracting from time that could have laid stronger foundation for the film’s narrative, which resolves itself on a rather perfunctory execution of genre thriller conventions that doesn’t really jibe well with everything else the movie was following through on, both good or bad.

Ultimately, “The Cloverfield Paradox” is a serviceable if somewhat unremarkable thrill ride that blends the subjectively perceptional mysticism of psychological horror with speculative science for a ride that’s not entirely compelling but consistently diverting.

What you take away from the movie however will less be on viewing its own fairly disposable existence and more on how much you’re willing to lose yourself to the “Cloverfield” experiment. Neither approaches are necessarily wrong but it does nevertheless make “The Cloverfield Paradox” the weakest entry of the series.

It’s definitely worth checking out for the curious but don’t let the legendary marketing tactic that went into it fool you.

6 Trans Dimensional Roars out of 10