USA
102 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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I'd advise you not to read this review if you haven't already seen the film, because I think this franchise is deliberately going for the effect of being much better if you don't know anything about the movies beforehand.
In classic Cloverfield fashion, the lead-up to this film's release was non-traditional: first a trailer dropped during the Superbowl, and then it was on Netflix in full after the game. That's kind of a bold move for Paramount and everybody involved- the experience is vastly different between going to a theater and seeing the new Cloverfield, and firing up Netflix on your iPad and seeing the new Cloverfield. I'd like to be less ambiguous about whether or not I think it's a gamble that paid off, but unfortunately I'm not wholly certain it did.
I kept comparing this to Cloverfield and 10 Cloverfield Lane, which I know was wrong, considering how the franchise seems to be moving in a direction of mostly self-sustaining films, but I did it anyway. And I came to the conclusion that the reason The Cloverfield Paradox feels different from its predecessors is because by now the jig is up. 10 Cloverfield Lane worked so well because if you went into it with no idea what it was about, you could genuinely get caught up in the story without wondering where the connection to the first film was. But with The Cloverfield Paradox, you know that sooner or later the monsters are going to show up, and all you have to occupy your time before that happens is a somewhat undercooked science fiction film.
This isn't a bad movie at all, and I don't want to imply that, but around 40 minutes in I just found myself wanting it to commit to something. It doesn't feel like it develops any one storyline enough to be satisfying. The things that happened, barring a few logical progressions, mostly seemed like weird for the sake of weird. Why would crossing over to a mirror dimension make a wall consume a guy's arm, and then reanimate the arm with a consciousness of its own? Why would it make another guy explode into a shower of worms? There's no reason for most of the strange things that happen in this film to have happened, and no explanation for any of it besides "we're in another dimension so stuff is weird now I guess". But why would a dimension that seemingly did not diverge in any significant way from ours also have conscious talking arms? This is a question for the ages.
The ending is excellent, though, and it definitely gives everybody what they came for. It's a payoff that makes the other 90 minutes feel slightly more worth it. But the severe lack of explanations and the random, uncontrolled way the plot seemed to progress at times made me question what in the world the director and writer were doing. If there is another Cloverfield film, I will definitely still see it, but at this point it'll have to do a little bit better than this to not make me feel like I'm just waiting around for a scene like the one at the end of The Cloverfield Paradox.
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