The mystery box collapses on itself. Vague spoilers to follow.
A decade ago, "Cloverfield" provided people with a primal giant monster disaster movie. It wasn't good, but it felt purposeful.
Eight years later, "10 Cloverfield Lane" provided us with a focused and tense claustrophobic drama with a very unnecessary ending.
It's 2018 and here we are. "The Cloverfield Paradox" is a loose prequel/sequel/else-world whateverthefuck and it came out of no where. There's another one of these movies coming soon so look out for that, if you're for some reason, a Cloverfield fan.
I'm gonna mostly skip the premise but I will mention that there's an inciting incident and obstacles for characters to overcome. There are stakes but the stakes are so broad that it becomes super difficult to feel anything for any one character -well, there is one character that we focus on played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw (who is serviceable in this) and we learn about her backstory and the rest of the cast are mere cannon fodder. We get a general idea of how most of the characters feel towards each other but never the reason why they feel that way or why they react to each other in a certain way or why some of the things happen the way they do. It's kind of like "Lost", things just happen and you're expected to just be cool with it. We get so little character development to work with and suddenly we're off on our weird adventure.
Let's talk dialogue and, by extension, the writing. It does that thing where everyone in the group understands English perfectly but one person, played by Zhang Ziyi (who's just awful in this) decides to go, fuck it, I'll just not speak English, look at how different I think I am! Recent examples of this include: "The Defenders" and 2017's "Ghost in the Shell". It was never cool and it has never made any sense. So stop trying to make this a thing. This movie is loaded with clumsy exposition. The thing the movie does with news reports is the worst offender. It neither challenges the audience or makes them feel smart for following along with what's going on. It's just lazy writing and poor filmmaking. There are jokes that feel very out of place with punchlines so obvious, that it's literally just Chris O'Dowd giving a play-by-play of what's literally happening in the scene. He and most of the characters make dumb decisions and sometimes there are one-off lines to excuse their unintelligible behaviour -but no one buys it. Daniel Brühl has a subplot that had potential but is pretty much abandoned completely and served little to no purpose. David Oyelowo plays a stock character out of a bad soap opera and we get a very sweet moment from him but none of that was ever earned. To put it bluntly, this movie needs a page one rewrite. Also, if you're doing a hard science fiction movie, do your fucking research into the science of your story. There's one scene that involves water and it was dumb.
Remember how the other Cloverfield movies used sound to elevate tension? Well, this does none of that. Sure, we get a somewhat generic score to fill in silence and sure we get jump scares but that's all there is. Just because music is conveying the sound of drama and triumph, doesn't automatically mean that the viewer will feel that way. Jump scares are the cheapest scares that you can do and you will hear every one of them coming from light-years away. They aren't scary, they're just annoying and loud.
To sum things up, the characters aren't good, the writing leaves a lot to be desired, and the sound design is less than revolutionary. The make-up and practical effects look good though and the b-plot (the thing that takes place outside of the action) is the best part of the whole movie even though it grinds the pacing to a halt. This would have been a really fun b-movie if it didn't take itself so damn seriously.
PS: Spoilers. Kudos to the literal Chekhov's gun. though I've never seen gunshots edited as poorly as it was in this movie.
PPS: Just like "10 Cloverfield Lane" the ending is only there to tie things into the Cloverfield universe. It also looks really bad.
