Two Cents Investigates THE CLOVERFIELD PARADOX

Two Cents is an original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team will program films and contribute our best, most insightful, or most creative thoughts on each film using a maximum of 200 words each. Guest writers and fan comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future entries to the column. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion.

The Pick

There’s never really been anything like the Cloverfield franchise in cinema before: a sequence of largely-but-not-totally disconnected genre films, each featuring a completely different story, style, cast, etc.

Yet even more noteworthy than the films themselves is the seeming game of oneupmanship that series mastermind JJ Abrams plays against himself to see how he can generate the most surprise and attention with the release of each subsequent film.

The original Cloverfield had its trailer dropped on unsuspecting audiences without even so much as a title. Just a shockingly gripping tease and a release date, months away. The Internet was immediately thrown into a desperate search to learn just what the film was, with some of the more out-there theories including that Cloverfield was actually a live-action Voltron movie (because a voice screaming, “It’s alive!” sounded like, “It’s a lion!”).

10 Cloverfield Lane took an entirely different approach, suddenly appearing on people’s radar only a month in advance. ‘They made a Cloverfield sequel? With Ramona Flowers and John Goodman and that Newsroom dude? It doesn’t look anything like Cloverfield!?! What is going on?!?’ Once again, the Internet stopped dead in its track trying to crack this particular mystery box.

But ol’ JJ may have outdone himself with The Cloverfield Paradox. Developed independently as a script entitled ‘The God Particle’, Paradox was (like Lane) converted into a Cloverfield film and sneaked through production with no one the wiser as to what the film was about or what it contained. When Paramount panicked and decided not to release the film (similar to their abandoning of this week’s Annihilation), Netflix stepped up and bought the film. The Cloverfield Paradox was announced and released on the same night, revealed to America’s biggest audience right in the middle of the Super Bowl.

‘They made another Cloverfield? And it’s in SPACE? What is going on?!?’

Once the surprise wore off, the response to the actual film proper was deeply divisive, with some enjoying the splatter-ific space freakout while many others blanched at what they perceived as the film’s sloppy storytelling and derivative nature.

Well, let it never be said that Two Cents isn’t on the cutting edge of the current cinema landscape. So join us as we dive headfirst into examining The Cloverfield Paradox.

Next Week’s Pick:

You love Aardman Animation. Even if you don’t know that you love them, you love Aardman Animation. Between the Wallace & Gromit shorts and feature film, Chicken Run, and their additional work in films, television, and commercials, the stop motion studio has created a look, voice, and tone that is instantly recognizable and entirely their own.

A Grand Night In: The Story of Aardman originally aired on the BBC in anticipation of the studio’s 40th anniversary. Featuring interviews with luminaries like Matt Groening and Terry Gilliam, A Grand Night In provides an inside look at how movie magic was born.

A Grand Night In is currently available on Netflix Instant.

Our Guests

Nick Spacek:

Don’t focus on how upset you are that The Cloverfield Paradox doesn’t fit into the Cloververse as well as 10 Cloverfield Lane, or that it’s not the movie you were expecting. It’s frustrating enough that the film — a really odd, strangely funny movie about dimensional travel, coupled with some intriguing horror elements — has so much going on that it already feels like two movies poorly-stitched together, even without the additional Cloverfield elements.

Let’s be fair: Chris O’Dowd steals every scene he’s in, and damn if his story isn’t the most intriguing. The arm thing? Brilliant and way under-explored. The familial story line which is arguably the driving narrative focus of the film would be great if there wasn’t all this other stuff going on otherwise, but there’s just too much happening to also jump back to Earth Prime every fifteen minutes. It’s a damned shame, because underneath everything, there’s a really great story with some great ideas.

I wanted it to be a little better balanced in terms of what it offered, but it was still an entertaining flick with the base film, underneath the alien invasion stuff, is solid fun. Definitely had possibilities left untouched, but here’s to hoping that the next film in the Cloververse is more than an otherwise entertaining concept with some monsters tacked on. (@nuthousepunks)

Brendan Agnew (The Norman Nerd):

This is not a very good movie, but…I had a pretty darn good time with it?

Honestly, I don’t have much deeper insight than that. I admire the original Cloverfield more than I enjoy watching it (though it made for a very effective theatrical experience), and I love 10 Cloverfield Lane largely for all the things it does before the Act 3 blowout…which I also love. Paradox fits somewhere in the middle, with a janky script that features a solid hook to hang “escalating sci-fi weirdness” on and a killer cast, but doesn’t actually hang together as a story all that well.

But fuck me if the players don’t keep me invested anyway. Gugu Mbatha-Raw practically carries the film on her back and manages a solid emotional throughline that both kept me invested in her and more patient with the franchise-serving diversions, and memorable beats from folks like Chris O’Dowd, Zhang Ziyi, and Daniel Bruhl walk a fine line between genre awareness and genuine tragedy that makes the doomed Cloverfield Station bear more weight than the patchy writing should imbue.

So…sorry, I like it. I can’t mount a passionate defense for it or anything, but — while it’s no Sunshine — I’d sooner revisit this version of goofy space science gibberish than, say, Event Horizon. (@BLCAgnew)

https://cinapse.co/pick-of-the-week-sunshine-2007-8dac8c0e3d2b

The Team

Ed Travis:

Netflix is a disrupter, and it’s just fun to watch them work. From the Super Bowl ad campaign and surprise drop of The Cloverfield Paradox to its purchase of the film from Paramount in the first place, Netflix has a big PR win on their hands. Unfortunately they’ve also got a genuinely bad movie. Unlike most bad movies, The Cloverfield Paradox is actually filled with good things. A cast to die for, great production design and cinematography, strong visual effects, and even an intriguing hook (combined with the aforementioned history-making secret Super Bowl drop) are not enough to save this film from its abysmal script. Going completely off the rails in its second act and building to an eye roll of an ending, The Cloverfield Paradox squanders all it has going for it in a spectacular fashion with an absolutely nonsense space horror conceit that both feels derivative (of better films like Alien or even Event Horizon) and chaotic, following no rules or logic and simply throwing things at an airlock until it eventually bursts. While the cast is [mostly] uniformly good, only Chris O’Dowd comes close to saving the film by seemingly live-trolling it from within the film (hilariously). (@Ed_Travis)

Justin Harlan:

For this sc-fi/horror fan and rabid Clover-verse enthusiast, the film is a pretty decent film that fits into the universe quite well as a new flavor of just what this Cloverfield endeavor seems to be embracing. The cast is fantastic, the story is entertaining, and the overall product is quite satisfying on many levels. That overly scientific jargon that some have complained about is a staple of space oriented science fiction — a staple I certainly embrace in the subgenre. The confusing moments in the plot feel intentionally so and are mostly ironed out as the film moves forward. And, as noted above, the performances from the cast are very strong. (@ThePaintedMan)

— Justin wrote a full review which you should check out below!

https://cinapse.co/pick-of-the-week-sunshine-2007-8dac8c0e3d2b

Brendan Foley:

What a mess. While not nearly the unmitigated disaster that the immediate reactions after the Super Bowl had me prepared for, the simple fact is that The Cloverfield Paradox is a script that was nowhere near ready to be shot, a movie that was nowhere near ready to be released, and idea that was nowhere nearly fully developed before it was written, shot, and dumped onto Netflix.

What amounts to three or four different sci-fi premises (all highly derivative of other, established films that those above me have already name-dropped) stapled together into a shapeless whole that never once coalesces into a complete and distinctive whole. The cast is hugely appealing, particularly the lead turns by David Oyelowo and Gugu Mbatha-Raw, both of whom put on strong movie star showcases, but they are all playing vaguely defined types instead of fully realized characters. Shifty German Guy, Funny Irish Guy, Religious Latino, etc. The movie expends zero energy into trying to establish them as empathetic humans, so when the film turns into an orgy of nonsensical disasters and weirdness, none of it resonates.

With more time and more polish, it’s possible that Paradox could have been the same sort of engaging genre adventure like the other Cloverfield films, but this finished product is like uncooked dough. (@theTrueBrendanF)