Movie Review: Netflix’s Surprise Flick “The Cloverfield Paradox” Is Basically a Prank On Us

Netflix saved The Cloverfield Paradox from becoming a box office bomb, but there’s no salvaging the film itself.

Have you heard? There’s a new Netflix Original movie.

Well, it’s only been a Netflix Original movie for a month. In fact, Christopher Plummer has been a cast-member in All the Money in the World for longer.

It's also a surprise Cloverfield movie. Though, that's a recent retitling too.

Originally called God Particle, The Cloverfield Paradox was retooled into a spin-off/sequel/namesake by producer J.J. Abrams mid-way through shooting, similar to how 10 Cloverfield Lane only earned its name in reshoots.

But 10 Cloverfield Lane was already a tightly wound and intense standalone thriller, plussed by its sudden sci-fi finale (its only real tie to the tenuous Cloverfield saga, and a late addition at that).

The Cloverfield Paradox, on the other hand, is a disastrous, basically unreleasable mess… with Cloverfield in the title. Abrams apparently wants to drop ‘Cloverfield’-branded flicks every other year, each belonging to the same loose universe, though not part of an ongoing narrative. Yet Paradox exposes the real business model: Slap a Cloverfield sticker on something that would otherwise sink without a trace.

The film, shot in 2016, was effectively dumped by original studio Paramount, who could probably smell a stinker, and purchased by Netflix, who unveiled it with a teaser during the Super Bowl, announcing its release immediately after the game. How fitting: a Hail Mary pass to make this a hit.

Still, it didn’t scrape the stink off. A group of actors this appealing, and a director—Julius Onah—this promising, should be put to better use. Netflix, give them a Black Mirror or something instead.

The plot, in short: Earth is facing a disastrous energy crisis, so a crew of international astronauts—on the Cloverfield Station—attempt to launch a particle accelerator to provide the planet with infinite energy. Onah skips through crew introductions and their early, failed attempts (or were they victim to reshoots too?), until they finally achieve the impossible and fire the accelerator successfully. Except, suddenly Earth’s missing. And random items on the ship have disappeared, including worms, a navigational system and… um, an arm, replaced, in some instances, by unexpected new inhabitants on the ship.

Writer Oren Uziel is credited with reworking his original script, which differs significantly from the final product, if this pdf is indeed the real thing. (Alarmingly, it’s worse than Paradox, with a climax that hinges on a racist penis joke and someone exclaiming, “Sausages!” like it was “Eureka!”) In its final form, the screenplay drops a lot of the bad comedy and focuses on the emotional turmoil of Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s heroine Ava Hamilton. She left a husband (Roger Davies) back home, and we see him dealing with the ramifications of their activities on terra firma. He finds a young girl (suspiciously-christened actress Clover Nee) and helps her avoid some otherworldly beasties. For 99 per cent of the running time, he is our only connection to the Cloverfield brand. Which is to say, this is not a smoothly conjoined cinematic experiment.

Onah, following in the footsteps of Abrams’ Star Trek series, cants his cameras and lets the lens-flare in, but there’s no revivifying this screenplay. There’s a loony moment where a disembodied arm operates with a mind of its own, and Bear McCreary’s booming, horn-heavy score suggests this could have been a gnarly horror movie with a real sense of humour. (As it stands, Chris O’Dowd is the lone source of laughs as a wisecracking Irishman who incongruously makes jokes in increasingly desperate situations.)

However, the misshapen nature of the picture becomes too much for anyone to overcome, from Onah to his most experienced actors, including the excellent Raw, David Oyelowo, Daniel Brühl and Zhang Ziyi. By the end, even poor Elizabeth Debicki (yep, she’s in this too) is forced to fight for her life with a 3-D printed gun (!) in a pressurised room, as if her character isn’t a trained scientist and spacewoman.

If you’re desperate to watch a feature-length Star Trek pastiche that’s thoughtful, thrilling and a bit funny on Netflix, check the first episode of Black Mirror’s fourth season, USS Callister. Now there’s a brand you can rely on for risk-taking. Cloverfield, from its origin ten years ago as an innovative and immersive monster movie, has mutated into something else entirely: A biennial prank on audiences.

2/5

Now available on Netflix. Rated M for mature themes, coarse language and violence.

Photo: Netflix