Review of The Cloverfield Paradox (2018) by Michael B — 09 Feb 2018

Doctor Who fans will be familiar with those bad two-parter episodes they put in virtually every season that see the Doctor and companion stranded on a spaceship/station with an ensemble cast of forgettable one-note characters. Often these stories borrow liberally from successful blockbuster movies. Virtually every one of these stories has the doctor giving monologues from inside a spacesuit at some point towards the end. They're a real slog. Now if you remove the Doctor and Companion from that equation, you'll get The Cloverfield Paradox.

At its core, this movie is a weak knock-off of Event Horizon, with some iconic scenes stolen from Alien. The Cloverfield link was clearly added in clumsily as an afterthought in a fumbled attempt to fix a movie the studio had lost faith in.

I feel like the superb cast deserved better than the terrible material they got to work with. The characters don't behave like human beings. They don't react to the many horrors the movie throws at them in any way resembling realistic reactions. I'm not sure if any one actor even had a consistent idea what kind of movie they were meant to be making.

This weird movie is Frankensteined together using parts of far better things and this is done so poorly that you can see the suturing. You can see the original movie in there and you can see all of the nonsense they layered on to try to fix it.

The biggest issue is that it is boring, it moves slowly and every character and every scene fails to entertain. I didn't even have to buy a ticket and somehow I want my $15 back.