The Cloverfield Paradox (2018) Review

"Logic doesn't apply to any of this."

-Tam

The 3rd film in the Cloverfield series follows a group of astronauts who go into space to test a particle accelerator in hopes of supplying Earth with infinite energy.  When a test finally goes right, but damages the ship in the process, the crew is startled to find that the Earth has disappeared.  As they search for Earth and repair their ship, strange things begin to happen as the lines between dimensions are blurred and the Earth they do find, might not be the one they left.

What Sucks:

This will be easier for everybody, especially me, if I start with what sucks first...there's a lot.  First off, the writing is just terrible.  The dialogue is pretty lazy, I gotta say.  I've watched movies and TV shows with dimensional crossover before, and the dialogue here is so generic and cliched.  Plus, the comic relief character, Mundy (Chris O'Dowd), makes the same jokes over and over again.  SPOILERS:

He gets his arm cut off and his dialogue for the rest of the movie is basically just him making dumb jokes about it.  We get it, dude.  You got your arm cut off.  Now shut up, and contribute something to the plot.

Going hand-in-hand with bad writing is the thin characters.  Besides our protagonist, Ava (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), not one of the astronauts receives any sort of character development.  They are essentially stock characters.  It's not like the actors are bad.  Both Daniel Brühl and David Oyelowo are excellent actors, but they simply aren't given anything to work with.  Even Ava isn't great.  She does have a character arc, but she isn't particularly interesting.  I simply didn't care about these characters and whether they lived or not.

Finally, the Cloverfield elements feel very tacked on.  Because they were.  They were added during production.  It comes off as very lazy.  I guess we learn that the the dimensional rifts caused by the astronauts in this movie caused aliens and monsters to appear in different dimensions in different years, causing the events of the first two movies.  It feels very forced and doesn't make a ton of sense.  

What Works:

First off, I do like the story, on paper.  Finding weird things in space due to dimensional rifts amongst other strange phenomenon is interesting.  We've seen it before it various episodes of Doctor Who, as well as the movies Event Horizon and Sunshine.  So, while I like the basic story, those movies and Doctor Who definitely do it better.

The other media I mentioned above gets very weird.  The Coverfield Paradox gets weird too.  It doesn't get weird often enough, but there are a few sequences; involving worms, a woman getting trapped in a wall, and a man's arm having a life of it's own, that are pretty weird.  These are easily the strongest scenes of the movie and they are actually really fun.

Finally, even with all of the flaws The Cloverfield Paradox has, it was still mildly interesting and entertaining.  I was never bored.  It's just that the characters weren't what was engaging, it was the general story and the potential for weirdness.

Verdict:

The Cloverfield Paradox shouldn't have been a Cloverfield movie.  It feels so tacked on that it kinda sours me on the series as a whole and doesn't excite me for the next one.  It has a ton of problems, but it's at least entertaining, but I can't recommend this movie.  I don't like the direction in takes the series and I hope the 4th film can do some damage control.  But I think it's highly likely that 10 Cloverfield Lane will end up being the only good movie in this series.

 5/10: Meh