Review of The Cloverfield Paradox (2018) by Enrique F — 05 Feb 2018

This movies earns the full four stars because unlike other scifi such as Prometheus / Alien: Covenant, or pretty much all the Oscar films, Cloverfield Paradox is not a film that is high off of itself. It knows it's a unique science fiction thriller that tells its stories in an atypical fashion.

I was blind sided by the sudden Superbowl trailer and am impressed at how Bad Robot can hide great films being made in an age of social media. Also the film itself: it's exciting and interesting. It knows it veers into the realm of scifi in which science is spun on its head and "logic" becomes irrelevant as our human cast becomes confronted with situations and scenarios they never expected and cannot comprehend.

I think this is why "critics" have a low opinion of it - their minds are too small to comprehend anything that veers off into the strange or atypical. If I had to describe, The Cloverfield Paradox harkens back to The Twilight Zone and H.

P. Lovecraft's horror novels - think On the Mountains of Madness or more recently Jeff Vandeermeer's Southern Reach Trilogy. Also the performances by actors Gugu Mbatha-Raw, David Oyelowo, and Roger Davies was very solid especially since given the premise they still approach acting as seriously as they would a drama or "real life" film.

Julius Onah the director did a fantastic job capturing the horror of space as well with great shots of the ship and environment that makes you believe it's a real space station actually in space and not a set which many of the huge blockbuster space films fail to do.