Imagine being surprised with a gift from a friend. They come to your office, put a nicely wrapped present on your desk, and say goodbye. How sweet! It's not your birthday; Christmas is long past. You didn't get married recently. This is just a nice little boost to your day. And then you open up the present and you look inside and it's … well. Yeah. I'm pretty sure that's doggie doo doo.
This is as close an approximation I can give to the experience of being surprised with the revelation that The Cloverfield Paradox was being released on Netflix immediately after the Super Bowl. Because, you see, The Cloverfield Paradox is a bad movie. It's not "so bad it's good" or "so bad it's fun" or "so bad you couldn't quite believe anyone who had any interest in the business or art of filmmaking would think it's a good movie." It's just bad: stitched together, indifferently acted, filmed on sets that look a bit like castoffs from a failed Star Trek pilot.
Bad.
And the worst part is that everyone involved knew it was bad. I don't want to get into the whole marketing/business aspect of The Cloverfield Paradox—if you're interested in that sort of thing, I go on about it at great length here—but it's worth noting, just for the record, that Paramount straight up robbed Netflix of $50 million, if we are to believe reports. I can't even imagine the bonus checks Paramount execs are cutting for themselves after getting this clunker off the books.
Set in the somewhat-near-term future, The Cloverfield Paradox posits a world in which energy resources are running dangerously low. There are only five years worth of energy left! To solve the problem, humanity has sent a team of its best and brightest from all over the globe into space with a big particle accelerator that is designed to find, I dunno, something that will provide us energy for free forever. All our problems will be solved, peace on Earth will reign, etc.
The crew is a friendly bunch, for the most part. Hamilton (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is the comms officer; she's sad about leaving her family behind and the only one about whom we know anything, really. Kiel (David Oyelowo) is the station's commander and an American, naturally (the only realistic aspect of this movie, in my humble opinion). Schmidt (Daniel Bruhl) and Tam (Ziyi Zhang) are math whizzes of German and Chinese, respectively, descent. Mundy (Chris O'Dowd) is an Irish … handyman? The doctor, Monk (John Ortiz), is Brazilian and spiritual. And the janitor is a Russian by the name of Volkov (Aksel Hennie). He hates Scmidt, because Russians hate Germans.
Of course, the plan to smash the atoms (or whatever) doesn't work and the team is stuck up in space on the Cloverfield station for two years, a mercifully brief sequence set during the opening credits. Time running out, they think they've gotten it all figured out—but what about The Cloverfield Paradox? What is The Cloverfield Paradox, you might be asking? Well, The Cloverfield Paradox is definitely not a tacked-on bit of after-the-fact claptrap voiced by Donal Logue clearly added to provide a veneer of franchise synchronicity to this motion picture. No, The Cloverfield Paradox is the fear that smashing the particles together will cause dimensions to collide and space time to be torn asunder.
I just have one question: How is this a paradox? I mean, it would be one thing if this were called The God Particle Paradox. The original title of the script, God Particle, lends itself nicely to the idea: What if discovering the God Particle in order to create heaven on Earth instead unleashed Hell? I'm still not entirely sure that's a "paradox" either, exactly, but it's close enough for government work. Everyone take a bow. "The Cloverfield Paradox," on the other hand, makes no sense. It's not a thing. It's nonsense. It's corporate jibber jabber designed to create brand awareness in an object that otherwise has none.*
Anyway, needless to say, the Cloverfield Paradox is real and after the particle accelerator does its thing all sorts of bad stuff goes down: monsters on Earth, a space station displaced to the other side of the sun, etc. And I could kind of buy all this if it weren't for all the other … stuff. Like, for instance, the space station coming to life and trying to kill everyone on board but doing so in the most amazingly inept ways possible. I mean, if you're a sentient space station and you're not just opening the airlocks, I don't even know what to do with you. At least the Event Horizon was trying to drag the crew back to the hell dimension whence it came. The Cloverfield is just kind of a dick.
At the end of the day, The Cloverfield Paradox simply isn't smart enough to work as hard sci-fi, and it's not scary enough to work as sci-fi/horror. At best it's a piece of fan service designed to explain why the "Cloverfield Universe" exists—and even then, it's kind of slipshod and lazy.
The one nice thing I'll say about this movie? Chris O'Dowd is funny, as always, and if the whole movie had been about him and a body part he loses halfway through the picture, I probably could've gotten onboard with all the rest of the nonsense that goes on.
*I don't mean to go on about this, but, well, I will. Sci-fi fans have been trained to think of "paradoxes" in terms of time travel. But there's no time travel in this film so there's no temporal paradox. The dictionary defines "paradox" as "a statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd but in reality expresses a possible truth," but there's nothing self-contradictory or absurd about the idea that the Cloverfield's mission could be dangerous; there's a reason they parked the ship up in space, as one of the characters mentioned. I just ... I don't know what the "paradox" is. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Maybe the self-contradictory or absurd proposition is "The Cloverfield Paradox is a good movie."