Netflix dropping a trailer for the latest “Cloverfield” movie in the middle of Sunday’s Super Bowl
appeared to be business as usual. After all, most of the year’s big-budget
blockbusters debuted splashy new footage during the big event. But when that ad
promised the movie would be available to watch immediately after the game? That
felt like something different.
That gutsy
bit of marketing instantly — and rather ingeniously — gave a renewed sense of
life to the troubled release. “The Cloverfield
Paradox” was originally set to be released by Paramount, but after getting cold
feet the studio unexpectedly sold off rights to the streaming service. So on
one hand, Netflix’s decision could be seen as in keeping with the “Cloverfield” series’ M.O. of secrecy and surprise. On the
other, it seems to be a clear case of a distributor trying to make the best of
a film that had already been dumped by one studio.
“The Cloverfield Paradox” began life as a little sci-fi thriller
called “God Particle,” but similarly to 2016’s “10 Cloverfield
Lane,” the film ended up being retrofitted to fit into the “Cloverfield”
universe. This process of reverse-engineering orphaned genre films into a
loosely connected franchise ended up turning out something pretty wonderful
with “10 Cloverfield Lane,” so the method clearly can
work. But the results are less successful here, delivering the least of the
three “Cloverfield” films by a pretty wide margin.
Directed by
Julius Onah, the story follows the international crew
of the Cloverfield Space Station — portrayed by a
great cast, including David Oyelowo, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Daniel Brühl, John
Ortiz, Zhang Ziyi, and Chris O’Dowd, each playing
exactly the type of role you’d expect them to. With the world on the brink of
chaos, the team has spent more than a year attempting to harness a new power
source to solve Earth’s devastating energy crisis. But their experiments
involving a massive particle accelerator end up knocking the crew into an
alternate dimension, and that’s when things start to go a little nutty.
“The Cloverfield Paradox” doesn’t set out to break new ground:
it’s reminiscent of just about any space station-set thriller, from “Alien” to
“Sunshine” or “Event Horizon.” It’s a silly, pulpy genre picture, with plot
holes a mile wide, but it’s at least well-acted and capably directed.
The film
delivers some nice “WTF” moments, but by the time things start to go haywire, it
hasn’t bothered to establish any concrete rules for its universe. When pretty
much anything could happen at any given moment, it’s impossible for any tension
to build up. And with nothing to tie its set pieces together, there’s no
momentum, which ends up making the elements that were clearly added to turn the
film into a “Cloverfield” movie stick out all the
more.
Watching the
film at home on a streaming service only adds to the production’s direct-to-video
feel. But in a way, that actually help thing — taken on its own terms as a
high-concept B-movie, it’s perfectly serviceable sci-fi entertainment. Holding
more interest for its place in the industry’s continuing efforts to shake up
the traditional film distribution model, “The Cloverfield
Paradox” seems destined to be more of a footnote in the history of Netflix’s
evolution.
This article appears in Feb 7-13, 2018.
