Review of The Cloverfield Paradox (2018) by David B — 11 Feb 2018

As with 10 Cloverfield Lane, it's pretty clear that The Cloverfield Paradox's links to Cloverfield were tagged on quite late in the day. But unlike 10 Cloverfield Lane, this film just doesn't work.

The basic plot is that a group of scientists go into space to attempt to solve the worlds energy crisis and prevent a global war. The plot feels like it was just a combination of Alien, Event Horizon and Sunshine. There is so little that's original about this film. I could forgive that if everything came together well for an interesting story but it doesn't. It's messy with sloppy script and poorly developed and uninteresting characters. So little time is spent fleshing out the characters and giving them a personality that I found it impossible to care about their fate. In fact, all of the character building moments were just chucked together in the opening credits, taking away the chance to get to know and be invested in them.

A film can survive dull, forgettable characters if it has enough going on to keep your mind active and the original Cloverfield did that perfectly by being fast paced enough to cover the fact that the characters were all rather one dimensional. Unfortunately this film has nothing like that. It's so slow paced that the deficiencies with the characters are thrown centre stage. And when things finally do start happening, it's either laughably bad, such a dismembered arm with a mind of it's own, or just ripped straight from better films, such as a scene rather similar to the chest burster from Alien, just without the drama or tension.

I really enjoyed the previous Cloverfield films but this film doesn't even come close to their quality and it's clear that the Cloverfield name has been tacked onto it in order to get people to watch it. Without it, this mess would be ignored by pretty much everybody If you like intelligent and well made sci-fi, avoid this like the plague.