User Reviews

MAJOR SPOILERS

You know the kind of friend who is always desperate to impress the group? So he tells a midly interesting anecdote, which turns into an unlikely boast and then escalates into blatant lies. The more he goes on, the less you are impressed; by the end, even the initially neat anecdote becomes irritating.

The Cloverfield Paradox follows the same storytelling school as this lying friend. This story of a group of astronauts working on a particle accelerator but ending up in a parallel universe had potential. This feels like an early draft though, messy, confusing and poorly thought-out.

Plot holes don't automatically spoil my enjoyment of a movie. I don't give a flying goat how it's implausible that Indy hangs to the U-Boot in Raiders. I'm not bothered by the family in A Quiet Place managing a farm in perfect silence. I notice this kind of stuff and, if it doesn't go overboard and the film is good, I'm happy to let it slide.

But the Cloverfield Paradox really is a string of nonsense. It's not boring or unwatchable, just baffling.

• The space station ends up in a parallel universe. The new universe's space station has crashed but, inside the Original Universe Space Station (OUSS), the crew finds a member of the other station. Shouldn't she have died with her universe's station, like the rest of her crew? Why is she there? Why her and only her? Because parallel universe!

• A gyroscope and some lab worms teleport inside the body of a character - who is seemingly unaffected for a while, although he has stuck inside his body an object as big as a cannon ball and a miriad of crawling creatures. Why? Because parallel universe!

• An astronaut loses an arm, absorbed into the wall of the station. The arm later shows up, moving indipendently and apparently sentient, able to communicate with the group. Why? Because parallel universe!

• The experiment on the OUSS unleashes monsters on Earth - the same creature(s) of the first Cloverfield, apparently, although the timeline seems different. No upcoming war or energy crisis was even remotely implied in the first movie (if anything, they had the best camera batteries ever). The setup for this development is a fleeting interview with a scientist who claims the experiment may... unleash monsters on Earth (good call, dude!). Why? Because parallel universe!

Incidentally, don't watch this for the Cloverfield monster; it has a screentime of maybe five seconds at the end. In fact, the whole subplot with the husband on Earth driving around and glimpsing at destroyed buildings feels like the result of reshoots and is irrelevant to the main story - remember Sean Bean in Silent Hill?

Also, there is supposed to be a devastating energy crisis, but the only sign is a blackout at the beginning. Apart from that, people use cars, cell phones, television... it feels lazy. It you want to convey how desperate the situation is, have characters on Earth light candles, burn furniture... show, don't tell.

I didn't hate The Cloverfield Paradox. The premise had potential, although it needed more re-evaluations than the Maginot Line before WW2. When the severed arm writes a message to the crew delivering crucial information no character from either universe could know (and again, it's not a character but a severed arm), it's not cool, it feels desperate. "Parallel universe!" becomes a catch-all excuse for every absurd development the movie tosses at viewers.

The visuals look neat; I'd be irked if I was one of the special effect guys and all my hard work went into this. Same for the actors: they all do a competent job, including protagonist Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Daniel Brühl, Zhang Ziyi, Elizabeth Debicki and Chris O'Dowd as the comic relief.

The real paradox is how you can spend money for great effects and a solid cast and waste them on this script. It's like getting a decorated chef for your restaurant and asking him to make a steak tartare with a rotten badger.

5/10

Well, maybe I didn't have very high expectations or my inner cynic has taken a holiday, but unlike the bulk of critics and reviewers here I found this to be a perfectly serviceable piece of pulpy sci-fi/horror entertainment. It's no '2001', granted, but it's a very good looking film with nice visual effects - especially considering the budget - with solid performances by a talented cast, and it doesn't bore you for a second. I'm willing to bet most genre geeks like me (by which I mean people who have a soft spot in their heart for any halfway decent looking sci-fi or horror B-movie), would describe this film as fun.

And while admittedly about as scientifically credible as a superhero movie, it's not quite as dumb and far-fetched as many of the most scathing reviewers seem to think it is. What quite a few people apparently didn't get is that 'The Cloverfield Paradox' riffs on the very real hysteria that broke out a couple of years ago when the CERN in Geneva (Switzerland) conducted an experiment to find the Higgs Boson (aka the "God Particle" - which incidentally was also the film's original title.) The CERN scientists hoped to find the God Particle by simulating conditions in the Large Hadron Collider - the most powerful particle accelerator on Earth - that were supposedly similar to those in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang.

A lot of people worldwide got scared shîtless by that idea, because they thought such a simulation could have unpredictable and possibly catastrophic consequences, and a couple of scientists even tried to stop the experiment by filing a case to the European Human Rights Court. The wildest theories started popping up in the media, like the experiment would cause black holes that would suck up Earth or open doors into other dimensions; heck: even a portal to Hell was considered a possibility, allowing demons to roam the Earth. So of course it was only a matter of time until a genre film would exploit the idea of a particle accelerator accidentally causing a rift into other dimensions and parallel realities across the space-time continuum.

And let's be fair here for a moment: in the history of stupid ideas for movies - especially genre pictures - this certainly isn't the dumbest concept ever to base a sci-fi/horror film on. Also, by putting a Cloverfield spin on it - which, btw, actually is kind of fitting given it offered the chance to explain how the creature from the first film "stranded" on earth - the filmmakers managed to get the film a kind of attention it otherwise certainly wouldn't have had. It was a smart marketing stunt (as was selling the movie to Netflix) and probably crucial to keeping the film cost effective and being able to put as much money as possible into the visual effects (the budget for the whole film was only 25 million, and practically the only P&A costs this film had was the Super Bowl ad).

What I also don't get is why people expect "hard" science from the kind of pulpy sci-fi/horror movie 'The Cloverfield Paradox' clearly is; there's obviously nobody who knows what would or wouldn't happen if other dimensions and parallel universes existed, let alone how physics would behave if they somehow "crashed" into each other. And of course it's all speculation and characters behaving erratically: that's part of what makes those films FUN. And believe it or not, that's exactly what I had. But don't take my word for it, make up your own mind; chances are, if you're into genre picutures (where solid entries with very decent visual effects are few and far between), you'll experience a similar sensation.

P.S. In case you don't know whether to trust this review or not, just check out the lists below, and you'll see exactly what kinds of films I like:

Favorite films: IMDb.com/list/mkjOKvqlSBs/

Favorite TV-Shows reviewed: imdb.com/list/ls075552387/

Lesser-Known Masterpieces: imdb.com/list/ls070242495/

Favorite Low-Budget and B-Movies: imdb.com/list/ls054808375/

Colleague mentioned this movie to me and was not impressed. I expected nothing and was positively surprised to like this movie more than most people apparently do.

What annoys me, is that a lot of people give this movie shit for missing logical explanations and not explaining everything that is going on by scientifically correct and accepted theories, but those same people give every super-hero movie a 9/10, that have the same problems.

This a JJ Abrams movie and JJ doesn't give a shit about logic and accuracy. He presents a premise, that could work and then puts all his weird, unexplained stuff on top of it to make it more mythical. Clearly this strategy worked a lot of times, so why stop now?

Most of what Hollywood produced over the last ten years is borderline cliched, illogical, pretentious and downright stupid, but they raked in Billions this way, so at least some of you pay for this crap (and seem to like it very much!).

I liked the intro and first climax, where the hell is earth? And of course the crew is panicking. They are tense and frightened, locked in this space station for over two years. A lot of people (back on earth) believe, that what they are doing could end all existence, so maybe, just maybe you snap, when something seems to confirm your worst fears.

They couldn't navigate and determine their position because of the missing gyro-thingy, another chance to fuel the panic well taken.

Maybe Im more used to the whole dimensions-colliding-and-weird-stuff-happening, but to me the premise was quite clear. Reminded me of the great Event Horizon.

After the space station collided with another dimension (not universe!), all hell breaks loose and very strange things start to happen. Here it starts to feel a little bit like Donnie Darko. You are not supposed to mess with other dimensions and the crew is experiencing this first hand "This dimension is eating us alive!".

Very typical JJ here! Take an accepted scientific theory (multiverse, dimension travel, etc.) and garnish it with some religious, mythical evil (your not supposed to do that, the other dimension "defends" itself). Either you go back to your own dimension where you belong, or you will be destroyed.

People have no problem with Cthulhu appearing out of nowhere in the first movie, but an arm eating wall it stupid? Does anyone here know, what happens if two dimensions collide?

And to top it all of you have people arguing about the science in this movie (just why even start?) and cite wrong facts by themselves (the water freezing scene was great and would work exactly like that. who locked her in and started the water flow? we will never know and we don't have to).

I swear this was written by a 10 year-old. A few quick examples roughly in order of occurence:

1) "The world is almost out of oil and everyone is going to die if we don't find this theoretical energy." I guess solar, geothermal, wind, and hydro-electric solutions don't exist in this universe. Plus it's the future, these technologies would almost certainly be much further developed/implemented by then to boot.

2) Within 10 minutes some random dude pretty much says, "If we conduct this experiment we could have monsters rise from the sea in the past!" Uh...kinda specific there, buddy. Almost like you've seen Cloverfield.

3) After the experiment goes awry and all the station's systems shut down, they can't detect Earth...and half if not most of the crew of scientists automatically assume it's because Earth disappeared. Not because, you know, the systems are down.

4) After confirming the Earth was gone they didn't think to use the stars to find their location until way, way later. Maybe I just don't know what scientists are.

5) When the Russian is thrown on a table and immediately dies, you hear a flatline. He was never connected to any equipment. This is one of the only enjoyable scenes.

6) Many drug trip-esque random events that have nothing to do with anything and don't even jive with the "different realities smashing together" theory. Example: a guy for some reason gets his arm sucked into a nonsensically morphing wall, the wall takes it off painlessly and spits it out, then the arm comes alive with a mind of its own ala The Addams Family (or Evil Dead 2), writes down "Check the dead Russian's stomach!" and in his stomach they find the exact battery they needed to do something.

7) Example 2: a tank full of worms loses only all the worms and they suddenly appear inside the Russian, killing him as mentioned from before. This, and many other stupid things, aren't "random events" but would take intelligence (or stupidity) and coordination to pull off. Though the woman appearing in the wall was kinda cool.

8) Wall Girl, who suddenly appeared from another universe, has to wear another dude's uniform because hers got chopped up in the wall's wiring. Good thing it's fitted perfectly for her size and shape. Future clothes rocks.

9) Wall Girl doesn't know Asian Girl because SHE (Wall Girl) is the alternate universe's Shepherd (experiment name) engineer. But later she (Wall Girl) says that Main Girl was never on the ship in her alternate universe because she (Wall Girl) went on the mission in Main Girl's place. Main Girl and Asian Girl have completely different jobs. This one's a thinker but it's a nice fat plot contradiction, even in a movie with alternate universes.

10) Favorite line: "Shepherd smashed a Higgs Boson, overloaded, somehow ended up here." I bet they just looked up trending science topics on Twitter and injected them randomly in dialogue, because these are just words.

11) So why did the metal glue grab the guy and stick him to the wall? And don't say the unexplained magnetism because that was pulling consistently in one direction and to achieve what happened it had to succumb to the magnetism then (after grabbing him) somehow completely resist the intense magnetic field and suck him to the wall like a monster, even though all the other metal did not experience this effect.

12) A room filled with water is instantly completely frozen when exposed to space, but a room filled with air exposed to space doesn't see as much as a speck of frost although water's thermal conductivity is way, WAY less than air's. Go science!

13) A group has to manually eject a giant spinny thing so the ship doesn't explode. The commander heroically seals himself in with it to eject it easier. A crew mate yells, "No! We can do this remotely!" I love it.

14) The miscalculated Shepherd experiment makes a bunch of random chaotic things happen including sending their ship to a different universe. How do we get back? Press the button again, make more more random chaotic things happen and of course it'll perfectly transport us back to the spot we came from but change nothing else.

15) Main Girl, before transporting back to her original universe/Earth, sends a message with constructional and operational plans for the Shepherd machine (what they're in space experimenting with) to hopefully save that alternate Earth's fuel supply. Though Wall Girl from that alternate universe/Earth is there to begin with because she's on the same mission, in the same space station, with the same device that malfunctioned. I think they forgot.

16) And best for last: They never say what "The Cloverfield Paradox" is. Do they mean the chance of multiple universes colliding? Because that's not a paradox, it's an effect. This supports my hypothesis that they just picked fun science words to scatter about.

It seemed that the majority of movie-goers enjoyed the first 'Cloverfield' film where an alien the size of Godzilla rampages its way through New York (even if most of us didn't quite understand why the film was called 'Cloverfield' in the first place. Then came it's 'sequel' (notice the use of quote marks there?) which used the 'Cloverfield' name in its title and yet bore little similarities to the original. Now, we have 'The Cloverfield Paradox.' I guess that at least this time I didn't expect it to instantly tie in to either of the previous two - and I was kind of right.

'Part III' seems to be a pretty generic horror movie set in space with a couple of scenes thrown in there which sort of pull it into the 'shared universe' that's apparently being created. It feels a lot more like 'Alien' or 'Event Horizon' where the crew of a space station orbiting Earth suddenly find themselves teleported to the other side of the sun, wondering how they got there and what the mysterious happenings are on board.

It's worth noting that this film has been released straight to Netflix, which is becoming the new way we used to say 'straight to video/DVD.' It's budget is acceptable and the sets are reasonably space age, until you have things that happen involving severed limbs which can move on their own. Then I started raising an eyebrow at the blatant use of CGI. The 'strange happenings' on board soon start becoming fatal and our cast begin to drop one by one, leaving it feeling more like an old-school 'slasher' film set in space. It does its best to try and make up for this by being a little more scientific than your average 'monster movie in space' and for that, it does succeeed.

There are those films where you can easily check your phone or pop out for a cup of tea. Probably not best to do that here, as it won't just be a case as you've missed a crew-member's demise, but the story has skipped settings (I won't go into detail about what I mean by 'settings' as I don't want to give away too much!) and you'll actually miss a vital plot point.

Now, it may just be my love of the 'IT Crowd,' but - for me - the stand-out performance went to Chris O'Dowd, who possibly relied on his ability for humour to own every scene he was in. The rest of the cast are also functional for what they're used for, but you probably won't really remember any of the characters; names (I even just referred to Chris O'Dowd's engineer-character as 'Roy!').

If you have Netflix and are generally a fan of sci-fi and/or horror then this is a decent enough little film to while away an hour and a half. However, don't look at it as much to do with the first two films - see the 'Cloverfield' films as more of a sci-fi anthology than a continuous series. This is one sequel where you really don't need to have watched anything that came before it to really understand what's going on (okay, maybe apart from the very last shot of the movie!).

Worthless film. This is why this skipped theatrical release. It's almost as if someone just wanted to make a social statement coupled with an inability to write a competent script and came up with a ninety minute, exhaustive film about a space station, crewed by nearly every race on earth, moving to a new dimension. Lots of goofy plot holes that make no sense; risk the planet and reality because people are too lazy to harness the sun for energy, space station moves to new dimension in a different location and yet picks up new characters, Chinese token racial character is the only one speaking Chinese but everyone can understand her. This film actually fits in well with the other garbage hitting the screen since 2017. Oh, and Ava DyVernay, where's the history being made here? Perhaps it is the fact that a sham of a film exploiting the Cloverfield name is so bad, after spending nearly $40 million Paramount realized the trash they had on their hands, and simply washed their hands of it. History in the making.

It's Cloverfield time again, boys and girls! If you weren't aware (and why would you be?), the third Cloverfield film was released last night on Netflix, minutes after it's trailer debut. Yep. The Cloverfield Paradox got even less marketing than 10 Cloverfield Lane. I'm not even sure how they can give the fourth one (supposedly coming next year) less than that.

Nevertheless, The Cloverfield Paradox is the latest, and it's an interesting one. It might even be the key to unlocking the whole franchise. There's an energy crisis on Earth and a group of scientists have been sent into space to work on a new, infinite energy source, by crashing atoms together like in the Large Hadron Collider. The latest experiment works briefly before things go wrong and all matter of bizarre events take place, like the Earth disappearing. Basically this infinite energy source managed to transport them across time and space, and smushed two dimensions together in a crude hodge-podge.

Cut out the Cloverfield connections, and this film is right up my alley already. It starts off really well with all manner of bizarre things happening. The exposition was a little too quick and a little too on-the-nose, but it at least gets all the posturing out the way so that the actual story can kick in; with the scientists trying to figure out how to fix what went wrong.

As for those Cloverfield connections though. On one hand it's really easy to see how it got shoehorned in to the franchise. There's pretty much no dialogue from any of the main characters referencing anything from the previous two films. Instead we get a sub-plot on Earth that really doesn't hold a lot of importance, we get an interview early on with someone seemingly related to Howard from Lane spouting about monsters, demons, and "creatures from the sea", as well as a smattering of Easter Eggs from in-universe companies, like the Kelvin gas station at the beginning, the Slush-O cup on the counter, and even some more obscure references in technology from companies parented by Tagruato.

While it makes Paradox more connected than Lane ever was, I'm not entirely sure it inherently adds much to the film itself. That said, what it does do in tying it to those previous films, is sort of explain what the hell is going on, and why they're all related. The brief interview we get talks about ripping apart time and space, and unleashing things from other dimensions. While the three movies are individually unconnected, they could easily be connected by a multiverse. How many alternate dimensions there are is unclear, but there must be at least two, if not three or four, and the effect the experiment has on time is also unclear. After all the first Cloverfield still takes place in 2008, with the Clover creature not being mentioned by characters in either Lane or Paradox despite clearly taking place afterwards (Paradox doesn't even take place in the present, but at least ten years from now), and the fourth film supposedly takes place in World War II. Whatever effects this experiment really had, its almost certain that it's the experiment in Paradox that connects everything together, maybe even causes everything (the Clover creature's emergence in Cloverfield, and the red flash in Lane that kicks off the alien invasion).

But anyway, back to the actual movie. I'm not going to lie, it's not a great sci-fi that'll go down in history. It has some nice ideas, but still falls back on some tired space station clichés. A lot of the details never really get explained, such as a helpful arm, or the appearance of a gun (that looks like a plastic toy, unfortunately), characters make stupid decisions despite being clever scientists and astronauts, the laws of space and physics are ignored in favour of drama, action, and/or tension, and by the end it becomes another space slasher as each crew member is knocked off one-by-one in different ways. For some these are major drawbacks that will make the film a waste of time, but for me they're really just minor niggles. The concept alone makes Paradox stand out for me, and while there aren't any truly revelatory twists or turns, it still manages to stay reasonably unpredictable from beginning to end.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw is really, really good as the film's emotional centrepoint, despite her more weighty scenes feeling a little thin, and Chris O'Dowd is pure entertainment in every scene he's in. Elizabeth Debicki gives us a character to make us feel conflicted over as well, toeing a grey area of morals to make you think. Daniel Bruhl, John Ortiz, David Oyelowo, and Ziyi Zhang end up being little more than scenery and plot devices though, despite there being potential in each and every one of their characters, which is unfortunate.

It's not the best Cloverfield film, but honestly it's not that far off from the first one that kicked it all off. I can see and understand a lot of criticisms Paradox has received so far (it's been out less than 24 hours after all), but I found it way too intriguing, and definitely entertaining enough, not to really care all that much about it's pitfalls. I give The Cloverfield Paradox an enjoyable and interesting 7/10. Definitely worth watching if you're a fan of the whole Cloverfield mythos.

I watched this movie and then read the reviews on here.

Really puzzled me that people did not understand the plot or the premise of the film. It was fairly basic and easy to follow. It wasn't the greatest space disaster movie I've ever watched but it was watchable. Most of the characters were relatable and I warmed to them, particularly Chris O'Dowd who had some of the best dialogue - Best line of the film as O'Dowds' recently severed arm writes a message to the crew about cutting open a recently deceased crew member "what are you talking about arm?" - literally laughed out loud at this.

If people couldn't understand that strange things were going on due to the crew finding themselves in an alternative universe whilst trying to figure out a way to fix things and get home then I'm afraid it's more to do with the general malaise that is endemic in today's population and not flaws in the screenplay.