So The Cloverfield Paradox is the third film in the anthological series, following 2008's Cloverfield, and 2016's 10 Cloverfield Lane. I have to say I've been keeping my eye on this film for a while and I knew that marketing would be unusual like the others but to release a 30-second teaser at the Superbowl and then drop the film on Netflix a few hours later was not quite what I expected.
I'll start with what I enjoyed. The Cloverfield Paradox boasts a pretty good cast, I genuinely enjoy seeing a lot of the people here. After seeing Captain America: Civil War, I was really impressed with Daniel Brühl's performance and here in this film, I once again enjoyed seeing his acting, this time as physicist Schmidt. David Oyelowo I think is a great actor and have followed his work since I really noticed him in Jack Reacher. Elizabeth Debicki and Chris O'Dowd, again, I thought did really great in their roles; O'Dowd is usually the funny man character so I was worried how he was going to fit in this sci-fi thriller but he really worked, still being used as the comic relief but in a genuinely entertaining way and fitting in with the context of the events. Our main hero is played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and although I had to scan her filmography to realize I had seen some of her previous work, I really thought she did a good job here and enjoyed her performance.
Now, it's fairly known that this film used to be a completely singular film called God Particle and that during production it was taken over and converted into a Cloverfield entry. Now I have problems with this concept in itself but as it seemed to work out for 10 Cloverfield Lane, I hoped the same would be true here. But no. What has ended up here is that a standard, but pretty good, sci-fi film has been injected with extremely forced Cloverfield connections. All the scenes and plot elements that occur on the space station I really enjoyed, there were genuine creepy moments, really tense action sequences and interesting concepts. But all throughout we kept cutting back to this guy on Earth whose whole role was to remind you that the movie was taking place at the same time as the 2008 film. These scenes and an exposition dump at the beginning just felt so forced that it really let it down.
I really want to be onboard for the Cloverfield franchise and the first two films I thought were average and fantastic, respectively. And here I really liked everything to do with what remained of God Particle, but if Paramount keeps hijacking films during production and forcing them to be part of this, then it's just going to get even messier. In the end, I'll say I was ultimately disappointed but wasn't at all bored during the film and I was entertained for the most part so I'll give it...
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