2018 Film Review: The Cloverfield Paradox (2018)

Directed by: Julius Onah
Written by: Oren Uziel, Doug Jung
Starring: Gugu Mbatha-Raw, David Oyelowo, Daniel Bruhl
IMDb Link

The Cloverfield Paradox is a conceptual mix of other sci-fi films with a bit of the Cloverfield brand thrown haphazardly on top.

The plot itself is intriguing if very familiar: humankind is on the brink of all-out war, so a group of scientists takes a powerful accelerator up in to space to try and create an unlimited source of energy. Things go horribly wrong and the scientists are trapped up in space with a lot of inter-dimensional horror happening around them. It's got echoes of other sci-fi work like Event Horizon, DOOM, Life, and Sunshine, in both concept and structure. There's also a subplot involving main character Hamilton's (Mbatha-Raw) husband on earth as it comes under attack by a gargantuan monster.

The film is a poorly-done mess, rushing from sci-fi horror cliche to the completely random freak event and back again, with little set-up and almost no tension. The film operates on the excuse that the merging of dimensions is wreaking havoc with all of space and time, so anything can potentially happen. The filmmakers use this as an excuse to bring a handful of horror scenes to life, but as much as they're cool and creepy in concept, there's nothing done to attach us to the characters they're happening to, very little done in the way of keeping the movie tense even though literally anything could happen at any moment, and very little time spent on the horror aspect of the scenes to make them agonising. It's all just boring and quick, with the only point seeming to be to kill off characters we were never made to care about in the first place.

This is only made worse by the inclusion of the husband's subplot, which has nothing to do with the main plot and goes nowhere important for any of the characters, and only serves to give the return of the Clover monster some facsimile of set-up. Precious screen-time is devoted to this character, but he does nothing of consequence and has no real arc, so all of his time is essentially wasted unless you really need to see a shadow of Clover before it shows up at the end. Likewise, other mentions in the film that connect this film to the previous entries in the franchise stick out like a sore thumb, only highlighting that they're a slapdash job at best.

It doesn't help that the dialogue is poor as well. The film drops an obvious exposition dump less than thirty seconds in to the film, and from there it does very little else. There are exceptions: Hamilton has a minor arc, Chris O'Dowd's Mundy gets a weak one-liner now and then, there's a bit of tension between Bruhl and Zhang Ziyi's characters, and Elizabeth Debicki's Jensen has a little going on with Hamilton, but for the most part the characters don't say a lot that would make them feel or make us care about how they're feeling, and when it does it's all so rushed with no build-up that it's often a wonder they bothered. 

It's a shame that the movie is constructed so poorly, because the performances are actually quite good, especially from Mbatha-Raw. The characters are never more than placeholders for jobs that need doing in the story, but all of the actors do a fine job and are never unpleasant to watch do their work. The only character who gets to be a little more is Mbatha-Raw, and while it's only the bare minimum of a character arc she still manages to draw you in with her emotion; even if the dialogue she speaks is weak she's expressive enough to sell it. It's only a small consolation in comparison to the bigger issues this movie has, but the film really does offer workable performances.   
 

The Short Version: The Cloverfield Paradox is a waste of several cool sci-fi concepts that never stops to focus on one long enough for us to be intrigued by them, and does little to elevate its charismatic cast to more than meat for the grinder.

Rating: 3.5/10

Published February 7th, 2018