Review – The Cloverfield Paradox

The Cloverfield Paradox is the third installment in the Cloverfield trilogy, following the found footage monster flick from 2008 and the 2016 claustrophobic thriller 10 Cloverfield Lane.

When hearing that there was going to be a third Cloverfield film, my intrigue was through the roof.  The first film is an insane monster movie that puts these alien creatures on Earth.  We don’t know how they got there or why they are there, which is all part of the intrigue.  The second (and better) film, 10 Cloverfield Lane, was a perfect film to show the effects of the attacks and the paranoia in the world.  I had no idea what the third film was going to do, but I was anticipating more answers or a different perspective on the events.

The Cloverfield Paradox has almost nothing to do with the other two films other than the final shot.  The film takes place entirely in space, which could have worked based on the creatures that showed up in the first one, but the movie doesn’t do anything with them.  The movie focuses more on alternate dimensions and the space-time continuum, a plot never mentioned or even thought about in the other two films.  The entire watching the movie I kept asking myself, “what does this have to do with anything?”

Explaining what the movie is about is pointless.  A really nice cast of excellent actors are in space for an experiment that goes wrong and send off to another dimension or something while also cutting back to earth and showing a man in the middle of the monster chaos who finds a random child in the wreckage.  This fine class of actors includes Gugu Mbatha-Raw, David Oyelowo, Daniel Brül, John Ortiz, Elizabeth Debicki, Zhang Ziyi, and Chris O’Dowd, all of whom are far too talented for a movie like this.  Their characters are under-developed, their dialog is cliche and boring, and the character motivations just do not work.

I think the only thing I enjoyed while watching this movie was the deaths of the characters.  I wasn’t cheering for them to die, but when they did, they went out in cool ways.  Some are reminiscent of older sci-fi classics, while others just got it bad.  I shouldn’t have enjoyed watching their deaths as much as I did, but that’s what this movie did to me.

Rumor is that there is Cloverfield 4 coming to theaters later in 2018.  I guess the one thing The Cloverfield Paradox did do was keep all the questions I had unanswered so I have something to look forward to for the rumored Cloverfield 4.  Hopefully the fourth installment ties in more with the other two in terms of story and quality.

Did you watch The Cloverfield Paradox?  What did you think?  Comment below or hit me up on Twitter and Instagram, @kevflix, or on Facebook by searching Kevflix.