Breaking news: I care about something that happened at the Super Bowl.
I know, it’s shocking, but hear me out. I didn’t actually watch the game, unlike roughly 1/3 of Americans, but I did hear about the trailer for The Cloverfield Paradox, and the film’s release mere hours later. The previous two Cloverfield films were known for their viral campaigns and clever marketing strategies, but the third installment has taken this to a different level.
There has always been a war between film critics and the film industry. Naturally, nobody wants to be told the film they’ve worked so hard on is a piece of shit, but the real conflict here is with distributors, and the stakes are box office returns rather than self-esteem. When Columbia Pictures sees that Ghostbusters has become the target of such critical vitriol that it severely under-performs at the box office, it makes a little sense to throw some of the blame at aggregate sites like Rotten Tomatoes. We live in a world where so much as typing the name of a movie into a search engine is going to bring up aggregate scores, so it’s understandable why a host of negative reviews might seem financially threatening. Still, I don’t necessarily subscribe to the idea that film critics actually hold much clout with general audiences. I feel it’s more likely that Ghostbusters under-performed because it was a bad film that moviegoers (especially fans of the original) just generally didn’t care for, and they told their friends. Regardless, the validity of these claims is unimportant. What matters here is that studios feel threatened. Stories of embargoes on early reviews for major new releases are practically becoming the norm, further demonstrating the kind of serious mistrust we’re dealing with.
I really, really hate beating this dead horse, but we are currently living in the age of digital streaming, and this has certain implications that I’m sure you’ve been made aware of long before reading this review. Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, and even fucking Crackle are all essentially transitioning from movie streaming services to distributors. In 2015, Netflix gave us the critically lauded Beasts of No Nation. Two years later, they gave us a tragic Death Note remake. As you can see, the results have been mixed.
The Cloverfield Paradox is notable because, in regards to marketing, Netflix has achieved something that big movie studios could only dream of. They released a trailer for a film that would be available to general audiences within hours, and kept it a secret until the big reveal. This was certainly the only chance this film had at being even remotely successful.
The Cloverfield name has something of a draw. J. J. Abrams is a name that people know. The first film was relatively successful, and remains one of the few found-footage style films to receive decent reviews. Last year’s 10 Cloverfield Lane had John Goodman in it. The reputation of this franchise wasn’t exactly in shambles, and yet Paradox still isn’t getting a theatrical release. This isn’t usually a positive sign, but Netflix managed to spin this as a “surprise reveal.”
Rumors of a third installment of Cloverfield have actually been circulating for quite a while now, and I’ve been on the fence as to whether or not I should care. The original didn’t really do much for me other than make me nauseous. I enjoyed 10 Cloverfield Lane for the most part, but that could be because it’s not a Cloverfield movie.
There was a script floating around Hollywood in 2012 called “The Cellar.” It was purchased by Bad Robot, a company ran by J. J. Abrams. Abrams most likely ran out of ideas for Cloverfield 2, and instead decided to inject a few Cloverfield callbacks into The Cellar, creating 10 Cloverfield Lane. It was relatively successful, but the lack of tie-in to the first film (with the exception of a single sequence at the end and a few name-drops) made its validity as part of a franchise suspect. Still, Abrams told us there were more Cloverfield-ish stories to come, and my hope was that any further installments would be original scripts.
Flash forward a few years to the troubled production of a film called The God Particle. It had been in development since 2012, suffering repeated release delays. This time, instead of just rewriting a script, Abrams took a film that was mostly finished, had someone else re-shoot a few scenes, and slapped the Cloverfield name on it. There’s a little more Cloverfield tie-in than in the previous installment, but not much. Apparently, this new franchise is going to be more about rescuing scripts from certain death than building a concrete universe.
I wish I could say that The Cloverfield Paradox is unremarkable; that it’s just a harmless Alien clone like last year’s Life. Instead, it’s a technical disaster that’s awful in some very notable ways. Its flaws are jarring, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find this labeled as so-bad-it’s-good.
In order to begin summarizing, I have to immediately talk about a few of these flaws. The first 20 to 30 minutes of this film are a true editing nightmare. It opens with a husband and wife stuck in a traffic jam apparently related to power outages happening in the city. They have a discussion about whether or not the wife should do this thing that sounds like it may save the world. Immediately after this conversation, we’re on a spaceship that’s shaking like it’s part of a climactic scene in a Star Trek episode. After the shaking stops, the opening credits are inter-cut with a montage of people performing some rather mundane tasks, amped up a bit by a heavy-handed score to make them look important. There’s even a scene in this montage that looks like it was lifted directly from a making-of documentary of the movie, complete with emphatic hand motions that say, “I am your director, here’s why your acting in that last scene was bullshit.”
Then, as if we had already been introduced to the entire crew, we’re thrust into a rather vague interpersonal conflict among crew members, while a news report about some conspiracy theorist who wrote a book called “The Cloverfield Paradox” plays in the background, a segment that’s supposed to explain why what our characters are doing is bad and dangerous. Something happens, the ship starts shaking, suspenseful music begins playing, and people argue some more.
Also, every scene described in the previous two paragraphs is separated by a shot of a floating space ship.
If that description of the first half hour sounds vague, that’s because it all feels like it’s happening at once, and the film’s complete inability to handle exposition just left me clueless about what was going on. It certainly doesn’t help that the atrocious sound mixing forced me to constantly re-adjust the volume on my TV.
So apparently, the setup for the film is as such: Earth is in a state of constant war over a vague resource called either “energy” or “power”. I assume they’re talking about natural resources, but it quite often sounds like they’re directly referring to electricity itself, or perhaps an even more amorphous resource, like “Go-Go Juice.” If humanity successfully launches this thing into space and makes it do the right science-y things, they’ll have unlimited energy. Unfortunately, those science-y things may be dangerous, and once successful, the ship and its crew are sent into another dimension where there apparently is no earth. The rest of the film is people turning on each other and dealing with the implications of an alternate reality.
When you cross over to another dimension, strange things happen. One of your eyeballs may move involuntarily. You may suddenly become filled with worms and explode. Your arm could be cut off by being absorbed into the wall, and then show up in another part of the ship. Random objects may become magnetized, somehow creating a sentient metal goo that inserts itself into every orifice of your body. That’s a pretty high suspension-of-disbelief prerequisite.
Oh yeah, there’s a subplot about the main character’s husband back on earth saving a girl and taking her to a bunker. That’s at least ten minutes of screen time we didn’t need.
Plot-wise, I’m going to keep this review spoiler-free, because some of this bullshit just needs to be seen to be believed. Still, there is one spoiler I have to talk about. Remember how the earth just sort of disappears? Toward the end, we find out that the earth was never really gone. It’s just a different time of day in this alternate universe, and the earth was hiding behind the sun the whole time. Yes, a group of highly skilled astronauts simply forgot to look in the only possible place where the earth wouldn’t be visible to them, and immediately jump to the conclusion that they had blown up the planet. I can’t even.
I’m about to draw a comparison that’s going to make this sound like a far worse film than it actually is. Remember that movie from 2000 with John Travolta called Battlefield Earth? Yes, the L. Ron Hubbard adaptation. That movie taught me about the “Dutch tilt”, because nearly every shot is either slanted for no reason or seems to imply that the camera is on the ground looking up at its characters. There are plenty of unnecessary Dutch tilts in The Cloverfield Paradox. It’s not nearly as prevalent as in Battlefield Earth, but there TONS of shots that are inexplicably tilted. This has been a relatively common trend in sci-fi thrillers during scenes of tension, but it happens when characters are having casual conversations and doing normal things.
For all its incompetence, The Cloverfield Paradox actually moves along at a rather brisk pace. Some of this is probably a symptom of rushed editing, but it’s also what makes this more bearable to watch than other so-bad-it’s-good films. Without the Cloverfield name, this would likely have been ignored if it ever saw the light of day, but thanks to a massively misguided publicity stunt, I foresee this becoming a rather notorious failure, and a part of me hopes it reaches cult status.
If for whatever reason you enjoy watching The Cloverfield Paradox and can’t wait for the next installment, rejoice! For the next Cloverfield project, titled Overlord, is coming in October of 2018. And it involves Nazis. Have fun tying that to the Cloverfield universe.
2/10
[Update: Overlord did not turn out to be a Cloverfield film. It’s also not very good.]