I'm a big fan of the first two movies in the Cloverfield 'franchise'. The original Cloverfield is a fantastic old school monster movie, and 10 Cloverfield Lane is a great psychological and claustrophobic thriller. The latter movie was clearly tacked on to the Cloverfield universe, despite having very little to do with the original Cloverfield. That in itself is not a problem, as long as the movie is good, which it definitely is. 10 Cloverfield Lane even suffers from being part of the franchise, as the tacked-on ending was not in line with the rest of the movie.
The Cloverfield Paradox tries to go the same route, where the movie is extremely loosely tied to the larger universe. In this case however, the loose ties are not saved by the movie itself, which is a jumbled mess of random and meaningless nonsense happening.
Basically, The Cloverfield Paradox is yet another space quest gone wrong story as we have had many in the past, with varying degrees of success. Unfortunately, this movie falls in the very bottom end of the success spectrum, due to its messy story and unfinished story elements. While I appreciate the fact that they tried to create a horror movie without an actual monster or villain, the result of this attempt is that they had to create a few scares and gory moments that do not really make any sense. In fact, none of the things that happen ever get explained in any satisfactory manner, other than 'the two dimensions collided/merged'.
Moreover, the whole storyline on earth was only added to pad the runtime and make for the very loose connection to Cloverfield. It did not add anything interesting and only raised more questions that it never even tried to answer.
Ultimately, the biggest sin of this movie is that it was boring and uninteresting, the last thing you would expect from a science fiction horror movie tied into a larger monster universe. I kept waiting for cool explanations and reveals, but they never showed up. What you see is pretty much what you get; just a few people getting killed off in gruesome ways, because that is what a horror movie does.
At the very least I was hoping for some cool tie ins to the original Cloverfield but even those were shoehorned in or flimsy at best. It certainly didn't answer how the monster was created or ended up there, something it advertised it would. It just resorted to the same old 'two dimensions collided/merged' non-answer all the movie used. I'm pretty sure that chronologically none of it even makes sense, as people in the original Cloverfield seemed totally unaware of the events in this movie.
In the end, this movie fails both as a stand alone movie, as well as a part of a larger franchise (due to it barely being part of that franchise). It's clear that the only reason that this is a Netflix film is that everyone involved probably realized that it would flop hard if this got a theater release. And I think that is the biggest positive of this movie: at least I didn't have to pay for it.
The Cloverfield Paradox tries to go the same route, where the movie is extremely loosely tied to the larger universe. In this case however, the loose ties are not saved by the movie itself, which is a jumbled mess of random and meaningless nonsense happening.
Basically, The Cloverfield Paradox is yet another space quest gone wrong story as we have had many in the past, with varying degrees of success. Unfortunately, this movie falls in the very bottom end of the success spectrum, due to its messy story and unfinished story elements. While I appreciate the fact that they tried to create a horror movie without an actual monster or villain, the result of this attempt is that they had to create a few scares and gory moments that do not really make any sense. In fact, none of the things that happen ever get explained in any satisfactory manner, other than 'the two dimensions collided/merged'.
Moreover, the whole storyline on earth was only added to pad the runtime and make for the very loose connection to Cloverfield. It did not add anything interesting and only raised more questions that it never even tried to answer.
Ultimately, the biggest sin of this movie is that it was boring and uninteresting, the last thing you would expect from a science fiction horror movie tied into a larger monster universe. I kept waiting for cool explanations and reveals, but they never showed up. What you see is pretty much what you get; just a few people getting killed off in gruesome ways, because that is what a horror movie does.
At the very least I was hoping for some cool tie ins to the original Cloverfield but even those were shoehorned in or flimsy at best. It certainly didn't answer how the monster was created or ended up there, something it advertised it would. It just resorted to the same old 'two dimensions collided/merged' non-answer all the movie used. I'm pretty sure that chronologically none of it even makes sense, as people in the original Cloverfield seemed totally unaware of the events in this movie.
In the end, this movie fails both as a stand alone movie, as well as a part of a larger franchise (due to it barely being part of that franchise). It's clear that the only reason that this is a Netflix film is that everyone involved probably realized that it would flop hard if this got a theater release. And I think that is the biggest positive of this movie: at least I didn't have to pay for it.