Film of the Week: The Cloverfield Paradox

The third film in the franchise, The Cloverfield Paradox is easily the most mind-bending, and as tradition with these films, subtly proves how it’s connected with the other two. Whether it’s through analysing the Easter eggs and references throughout or piecing together other bits of information to form your own theories, this trilogy of films is probably the most distantly related interconnected trilogy sharing the same lore and continuity.

Whilst the first was purely told via first-person perspective with found-footage, it was only but a monster movie with a lot more depth compared to others – but it had been noted it can be difficult to focus on certain points because of the extremely shaky camera, even for a found-footage film. The second told its story via third-person, and did have small hints connecting it to the first, but J.J. Abrams stressed they’re more spiritual successor to the first. It was also once a different story entirely with entitled “The Cellar”, but during production, was morphed into 10 Cloverfield Lane.

The third film followed the same production cycle as its predecessor; it wasn’t connected to the previous two in any way, but was a script about a space station crew entitled, “God Particle”. The production company, Bad Robot once again morphed the script to connect it to the Cloverfield franchise and The Cloverfield Paradox was released, featuring a space station crew, experimenting and testing a new method on how to create a sustainable infinite energy source for Earth. This experiment didn’t go as planned and they found themselves in a different universe entirely. That’s right, we’ve gone from being a found-footage monster movie to a third-person science-fiction, reality bending, universe hopping film with a psychological horror film in the middle. Three different genres of movies in the same franchise. I can’t think of any franchise that has changed its genre so radically as Cloverfield has.

You can certainly view them as separate films, but the third does show visually, a more of a connection to the first, although eagle-eyed viewers have observed the dates of the three films don’t line up with each other, prompting many fan theories and diagrams and explanation videos to spawn all across the internet, a couple of which I’ve watched and were interested in as they all generally made sense. Some points remained consistent throughout every video, but each video does end on a different theory, and that’s what makes Cloverfield an incredible franchise. To not blatantly connect them, but instead drip-feed subtle nods, giving the viewers something to get their teeth stuck into and their minds churning on the information; it’s not just an average movie-going experience, but much more of an interactive one. You can certainly just watch them without diving into the lore, or you can look further – that choice is totally up to you.

As a fan of stories featuring time travel and hopping between parallel universes, I did find this enjoyable, especially with how they represented the two universes interacting with each other, so I can admit there might be a bit of bias with this review, as it does have particular elements I do like, but as someone who does like these stories I have certainly seen plenty featuring time travel and parallel universes. I know when a film with those elements is bad and when it’s good, and I can happily say this is one of the good ones. Just because it does have two of my favourite elements in film doesn’t automatically make it a good movie; The Cloverfield Paradox is a genuinely good usage of those two factors, and is a perfect addition to the Cloverfield franchise.

I’m just intrigued with how they will inevitably continue it forward. Maybe they’ll see a script under development and turn it into the fourth film – if it worked well for the other two, then why not the next one?

Thanks for reading

Antony Hudson

(TonyHadNouns)