Movie Review: The Cloverfield Paradox (2018)

Can we just take a second to talk about how this movie just came out of fucking nowhere? We’ve gotten a few tiny details about it for a while, but we knew jack shit about it. Then last night during the Super Bowl a teaser for it was released that said “Hey, this movie is getting released on Netflix right after the game”. That is unprecedented in the modern film industry. It’s fucking insane. Anyway, here’s a review of the movie.

Ladies and gentlemen… “The Cloverfield Paradox”.

The earth is going through a bit of an energy crisis, so a group of scientists work on a space station to try to solve it. But when they test out a device intended on solving it, they accidentally seem to mess with space-time, which means they have to face whatever consequences that come from their actions. So now we have our space-thriller. And is it any good? I’ll give it this, I was never bored of the plot in any way here. My problem is that the space-thriller here, while having some interesting ideas going on, never goes all-out on them and just comes off as a bit undercooked and bland. Then we have the “Cloverfield” part of the title, and this movie is somehow trying to connect all the movies in the Cloverfranchise, and it doesn’t always make sense that way. So overall here we have a messy plot that is undercooked and bland. The space-thriller side of the plot is kind of fun at times, but the entire thing is messy.

The characters here are a bit uninteresting. If you wanted me to go in-depth with them, then I couldn’t do that. I don’t know enough to do that. The only one we get some idea about is Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s character, and even that is a little too weak to fully care. But I can at least say that the cast here is really solid, and they all do quite well (some better than others). Other than Mbatha-Raw, we also have people like Daniel Brühl, David Oyelowo, Chris O’Dowd, Aksel Hennie, Ziyi Zhang, John Ortiz, and Roger Davies, all doing well in their roles.

Like with “10 Cloverfield Lane”, the score for this movie was composed by Bear McCreary, and it’s good… almost too good. It’s really exciting and overall very well composed, and somehow always outshines the scenes that feature it (hence why I called it “too good”). Sure, at times it does kind of succeed in making some moments/scenes more exciting and slightly tense. Good music, doesn’t always fit.

This movie was directed by Julius Onah and I think he did an okay job. Again, when it’s just the contained space-thriller the movie can be pretty fun, even if it doesn’t always work in a narrative way. But he does capture the feel of isolation quite well, making me feel a bit more interested in what’s going on. Though there’s an overall lack of actual tension. And the scares aren’t really scary. Mildly creative, but not scary. The cinematography is good, and the visual effects and sets looks fantastic. There’s good stuff here.

This movie just came out, so it doesn’t have too much data on my usual sites (at the time of writing). But on Rotten Tomatoes it has a 13% positive rating. On Metacritic it has a score of 36/100. And on imdb.com it has a score of 6,7/10.

“The Cloverfield Paradox” is a heavily flawed movie, but it does still have some fun to it. The plot is messy, the characters uninteresting, the performances are great, the music is good, and the direction/cinematography/effects and such is good. Time for my final score. *Ahem*. My final score for “The Cloverfield Paradox” is a 6,55/10. So while it’s far from great, I’d still say that it could be worth watching.

My review of “The Cloverfield Paradox” is now completed.

I’m still excited in seeing what the Cloverfranchise could bring next.