Another 31 Days, Another 31 Screams: Day 6 (The Cloverfield Paradox)

Wanna give me a hand in reviewing this one?

Well, how about that? A movie from this year, of all things. It turns out I can watch things that weren't made over 25 years ago after all. I really do love how this movie just sort of appeared out of nowhere, though. In this day and age of spoiler and hype culture making everything premanaged and prepromoted, it's refreshing to just have an entire feature-length movie dropped online as a Super Bowl surprise. I don't think absolutely anyone was expecting it to happen, but it dropped and I was there on release day. Well, by "there" I mean "in my room with Netflix fired up", but you get the idea. At the time, I really loved it! A lot of people didn't and it got middling to negative reviews. On a rewatch, I have to say... it lost a lot of its luster. As it turns out, the movie mirrors the unique circumstances of its release. I'll level with you, before I go on; if you haven't seen The Cloverfield Paradox AND you give a shit about Cloverfield or sci-fi horror in general, just click out of the tab and load up Netflix to watch it. This movie is at its absolute best when you know nothing about it and can thus be shocked and awed by the weird and wild shit it does. When you, like me, give it a rewatch with the vague understanding of where it's going, what it's doing, and what the visceral shock horrors are? Its power is diminished. With all that out of the way... here's The Cloverfield Paradox.


Okay, so it's a Large Hadron Collider in space. That's the Cloverfield space station, ready to help solve an energy crisis plaguing the Earth. The paradox comes from the inherent danger of smashing atoms together, as said by a talking head on the news. It's almost a punchline at this point. Ten years after anyone who gave a shit about why a big monster wrecked New York in a found footage movie, we get the probably-maybe-it-might-have-been explanation of... a particle accelerator in space malfunctioned and made some dimensional fuckery? It's a letdown, but let's be real. Any explanation would have been a letdown. Cloverfield, like other found footage films before it, traded well on its ambiguity. You weren't supposed to understand it. All you were supposed to understand was the shit happening directly in front of you. What, then, is happening in front of us now? Dimensional fuckery. The walls between realities are thinner now, and things from one side are bleeding over to another in hilarious and fucked-up ways. The best and most memorable parts of The Cloverfield Paradox are these visceral jaunts into body horror. Volkov having worms teleported inside his body that fuck him up and drive him a bit unstable. The monstrous shrieking from inside the walls that turns out to be a stranger fused with the internal wiring and screaming in sheer agony. Everything to do with Mundy's fucking arm. This is why I warned you to close this off and go watch the movie if you hadn't; this shit hits you right in the gut unexpectedly, and it's GREAT. Even 9 months later, on a rewatch, I knew it happened and it landed with far less of a shock than it should have. The only exception was the worms, which still got me good.


It's not perfect by any means, of course. I'm sure there's some interesting artistic and storytelling intent behind the cutaways to Earth in crisis after the accelerator malfunctions, but I'm not a fan. It's all well done and tense, but it sort of gives the game away and all but confirms that Cloverfield monsters are running rampant... and yet the final shots of the movie are treating this as some sort of big twist ending! I can only imagine the sheer shock value of having those final shots without any of those cutaways, and it saddens me a little. Still, I must say... it's not nearly as bad as those reviews would have you believe. My opinion of it lowered just a bit now that I was expecting half of this stuff, but it's still a solid sci-fi horror film. It's a shame they bothered to try and explain things, but sometimes you just have to shrug and let these things be.