And Then Stuff Happened…

I am not going to try and pretend that the Cloverfield films are, somehow, great art. They’re a collection of genre works that barely connect to each other, largely selling themselves on the mystery of their stories more than any kind of connective, shared universe. The first film was a pretty decent kaiju movie that worked best when you didn’t try to think about anything that was going on. It wasn’t a film that bothered explaining itself, and, because of that, it also didn’t really want or need you to start digging into any of the events of the movie. A monster shows up, people run from it, chaos ensues. It works.

The second film, 10 Cloverfield Lane, wasn’t even meant to be a Cloverfield film originally. J.J. Abrahams stepped in during the production and said, “let’s rewrite the ending to tie into the previous film somehow.” That’s how we end up with the story of a woman kidnapped by an end of the world prepper evolving into an alien invasion thrill right at the tail end of its last act. It works, but there’s no denying that the best parts of the film are the tense sequences within the bunker, before the alien invasion is even revealed. The connection to Cloverfield feels very much like an afterthought, and it shows.

But even that film works well in comparison to The Cloverfield Paradox. At least 10 Cloverfield Lane has a straightforward, understandable story that never makes you question the sanity of the production staff. By comparison, The Cloverfield Paradox is a film so stupid, so insipid, it makes you wonder if anyone involved ever thought for five seconds about anything they were writing, filming, or producing. Ignoring the tacked on Cloverfield connections, this film is just plain bad by any standard measure, and the fact that it then is connected to a larger universe just makes all the other works in the series seem dumber by comparison. There’s a reason Paramount dumped this film direct-to-NetflixOriginally started as a disc-by-mail service, Netflix has grown to be one of the largest media companies in the world (and one of the most valued internet companies as well). With a constant slate of new internet streaming-based programming that updates all the time, Netflix has redefined what it means to watch TV and films (as well as how to do it). as fast as they could.

The film focuses on the crew of the Cloverfield, a massive space station floating over Earth, which is the home to a particle accelerator. The goal of the accelerator, named Shepard, is to produce a limitless, automatically generating source of energy for all of humanity. The Earth is in shambles, struggling through a global energy crisis that has all of the nations on the brink of war. Tensions are escalating every day, and it’s thought that the Shepard project is the only way to create enough energy to pull everyone back from the brink of total annihilation.

The crew of the Cloverfield – Gugu Mbatha-Raw as communications officer Ava Hamilton, David Oyelowo as Commander Kiel, Daniel Brühl as physicist Ernst Schmidt, John Ortiz as medical doctor Monk Acosta, and Chris O'Dowdm, Aksel Hennie, and Zhang Ziyi as project engineers Mundy, Volkov, and Tam – have been working tirelessly for nearly two years in space, trying to get Shepard working. Finally, with barely any fuel for the experiments left, they get the accelerator to successfully fire. Unfortunately it quickly overloads… and then more bad shit happens. The Earth is missing, a woman appears in the walls of the space station, key tech vanishes. All of this is from the experiment, somehow, and now the crew has to figure out what’s going on so they can, someway, get back home.

Let’s be clear, The Cloverfield Paradox is incredibly stupid. There is no way anything going on in this movie would ever happen. At all. None of it makes sense. For starters, if the Earth is in an energy crisis, how would it be possible to get all of the materials together to put up what is clearly the biggest space station the world has ever seen. This thing, as depicted in the film, is several factors larger than any space station we’ve managed to put out in our current timeline, and we’re supposed to assume that this future version of Earth, which is basically falling apart from a lack of resources, somehow has the ability to front this massive space station simply for the good of mankind? That doesn’t track.

Also, why is the particle accelerator in space? We already have massive particle accelerators down here, such as the Large Hadron Collider. The movie waves its hands and says, “well, we won’t know what could happen if we fire off something this big,” except we do know. The science is proven. They’re not going to rip open a hole in time and space, despite what conspiracy theorists (and this movie) might want you to believe. Besides which, if, somehow, firing a particle accelerator could rip open a black hole, it’s not as if having that up in orbit around the Earth would be any less deadly than having it on the surface. A black hole would still destroy the planet no matter how far away in orbit from Earth you put it.

So that’s the premise of the film shot down immediately. That doesn’t even get into all the stupid things that happen once Shepard is fired. At that point the crew (spoilers for the first act of an eight year old movie you weren’t going to watch anyway) are warped to a parallel universe and strange things start happening left, right, and center. Some of it, like the woman appearing in the walls of their ship, is interesting. If she’s from this other reality, she could have been displaced with the two ships aligned and that would have trapped her in the conduits. That you can accept. But other stuff, like worms warping inside a human, an arm getting sucked into a wall and then cleanly sucked off, only for it to then appear, animated on its own, and able to communicate through writing… yeah, the fuck is going on there?

The Cloverfield Paradox doesn’t have answers for any of this. Its answer is, “particle accelerator, and don’t think about it,” but that can only explain so much. What the film really wants is to present a lot of really weird shit just for the sake of, without any rhyme or reason to why, all so it can then say, “hey, wasn’t that neat? Isn’t it cool how all this stuff is happening?” But there’s no logic to it, no plausible explanation for anything that happens. Stuff happens for the sake of it happening, and trying to think about it at all only illustrates how stupid it all is.

I’ll be honest, my brain shut down and I stopped caring about the events of the movie halfway in. It’s hard to care what happens when, clearly, the film doesn’t care about reason, logic, or explanation. The film wants to act like it’s a solid, sci-fi adventure tackling a major issue of our current era – energy issues as the Earth slowly dies by our own hands – but then it has nothing relevant to say and no intelligence about anything it does. It’s the worst kind of science fiction, the kind that dresses itself up in the genre but doesn’t actually have any science in it at all.

And look, if the film wanted to be a modern sci-fi horror film, all it would need to do is come up with some actual, plausible answers for all of this. “Oh, it’s all happening because the space station opened a gateway to hell.” That’s a stupid answer, but at least it explains away everything. “An animated arm? Sure, that could be a demonic possession. I’ll buy that.” Then at least we’d have a film that’s stupid but fun. The Cloverfield Paradox isn’t fun, it’s just stupid, and there’s no reason to watch a film like that.

Paramount tried to dump this film as fast as they could, cancelling its theatrical release and plopping it on Netflix instead (where it quickly died). After, any plans for future Cloverfield films quickly dried up. There were sequels and crossovers and further tie-ins planned, but it’s been eight years and with the downsizing of Bad Robot, J.J. Abraham’s studio, this is likely the last we’ll see of the franchise. It started so well, with a kaiju found-footage film that was fun, if nothing else. Somewhere along the way, though, the series last all sense of fun, as well as its intelligence, and the end result is The Cloverfield Paradox, a film too stupid to live.