Woah, woah, woah-verfield

I don't know if I've ever said it outright, but I am no fan of JJ Abrams. 'No fan' here having the actual meaning of 'I think he's an intolerable and overrated hack with an insufferable affinity for style over substance'. People still cite Alias as a defining moment and I'm pretty sure he just ripped that straight off from La Femme Nikita. Lost was indecipherable garbage by the end, aided and abetted of course by the equally terrible Damien Lindelof who frankly is responsible for some of the shoddiest storytelling this side of when kids first learn to tell jokes and all you get is a non-sensical stream of words randomly strung together to form a sort of sentence (dear God, I just described the scripts for all five Transformers movies). Super 8 was probably the only thing if his I managed to get through without wanting to murder everything in sight. His Star Trek rehashes were apparently OK, but frankly I couldn't get past the lens flare (cheap shot you say? No such thing) and we all know what I thought about The Force Awakens.

Cloverfield was at least OK. Abrams produced it rather than directed, so it sort of bypassed the hackery a touch. Sure, it was a monster movie with not much monster in it, which in itself is becoming an alarming trend but still. 10 Cloverfield Lane was again, not too bad all things considered and even if the link to Cloverfield felt a little bit tacked on at the end, it was a decent low budget horror/thriller with enough going on to make three people in a bunker interesting for an hour and a half. Just like delicious cake, you can have too much of a good thing.

The Cloverfield Paradox snuck up on basically everybody via the time-honoured tradition of a Superbowl ad. For the US at least advertising space during the Superbowl is both ridiculously expensive and a huge status thing, so to have Cloverfield pop up unexpectedly was a bit of a jolt for most people; partially because we were expecting Paramount to be releasing it in cinemas and partially because we were expecting it to be called God Particle or something. It transpires that Paramount had decided to sell it to Netflix and they in turn had decided not to hang around and get it on to our screens as soon as humanly possible. Having now sat through it, I am in no way shocked or surprised that Paramount didn't fancy chancing it in cinemas.

It's absolute toss.

The plot is more like a game of Sci-fi trope bingo than a coherent story. Energy crisis dooms planet? Check. Risky science experiment? Check. Astronaut separated from their family? Check. Sceptical conspiracy theorist warns everyone exactly what's about to happen but is roundly ignored? Check. I could go on but writing the word check so often has already robbed it of its meaning and it doesn't sound right in my head any longer.
Effectively, this is a poorly crafted appropriation of themes from Event Horizon, Sunshine, Alien, Interstellar and basically all the half decent Sci-fi movies released in the last 15 years. Of course, there are only so many ways to tell a tale, but The Cloverfield Paradox just does it so badly it leaves you wondering why you just invested one hour and forty two drudgerous minutes of your life in it.

Nonsense is the order of the day here; why would the 3D printer that hitherto only produces food have plans for a gun included? Alternatively why has nobody noticed the Russian nutter rigorously devoting his down-time to learning CAD and producing completely unnecessary weapon schematics? What exactly is causing the ship to eat people's arms, open external airlock doors on people or transport very specific parts of the ship into people's abdominal cavities? Other than to creep you out, what's the point making that guy's eyeball defying all known physiology? Just like Lost, we get stupid questions but here they don't even try to give you a stupid answer.

Stylistically the whole thing feels more like a less clever Black Mirror (although I can't really say I'm that much of a Black Mirror fan either, but it's smarter than this horse shit) or a particularly expensive episode of Doctor Who. The cast is OK, but you get the feeling they aren't quite sure how to play it: is it dark comedy or serious Sci-fi? It's not really Chris O'Dowd's fault per se, but it's hard to take him seriously when his previously eaten arm re-appears. It's not funny, it's not scary, it's not tense; things just happen and as the crew slowly get offed the only real feeling you get is a sense of boredom and honestly I got hungry enough to go and make a sandwich and missed nothing of import. It was probably on of the random, pointless husband-on-Earth scenes which didn't advance the plot and just slowed everything to a crawl.

At this point you're probably wondering how this relates to either of the preceeding movies and so was I. There are literally 3 small nods throughout the film. Nod one: The space station is called Cloverfield Station. Nod two: when they turn on their particle collider (which is apparently going to solve the energy crisis because of reasons) they go split themselves in between two dimensions and one of the space stations crashes into the sea, which is a reference to a tiny Easter egg in the credits of Cloverfield. Nod three: a literal two second long shot of a Cloverfield beastie right at the end. And that's your lot. If you took these three tiny scenes out, you'd decrease the run time by roughly 12 seconds and make no difference to the plot at all. Yikes.

This is not a Cloverfield movie. This is a crap, derivative and lifeless Sci-fi movie that somehow convinced JJ Abrams to fork out some dough on the proviso that they made it link up with the Cloverfield universe. (On further research it turns out that's exactly what it was and all the husband on Earth scenes were added later to try and link it to the original move. Wow. The barrel definitely has a bottom and here we reside, scraping away). No wonder Paramount dropped it like the burning bag of dog turd that it is; if the Academy gave out Oscars for Best Business Decision Following a Previous Awful One, they'd be a shoe in.