Mini Film Review – The Cloverfield Paradox

This weekend, I watched The Cloverfield Paradox; and I was absolutely lost! Directed by Julius Onah, The Cloverfield Paradox is the third film in the Cloverfield series; and follows the lives of a small crew of scientists aboard a space station; who discover that the Earth has disappeared. It was like the film wasn’t even made to be a film, it felt more like I was dropped into episode five of a 13 episode science fiction TV series. The film took quite a while to lead up to it’s first major moment, it’s inciting incident; meanwhile we are not introduced to any characters other than a few flicks and clicks of the fingers as the film continues to jump from moment to moment not creating, nor explaining anything of what’s going on! The film doesn’t even technically explain what or why these people are attempting the experiments that they are, other than for a few blink and you’ll miss-it TV news reports. The scenes set on Earth with Roger Davies are pretty engrossing and create moments that you just want to discover more about, however these scenes make up less than a seventh of the entire film, meanwhile Gugu Mbatha-Raw and crew, most of which you really don’t care for or know anything about other than rumours, just jump from moment to moment trying to come up with something to do with something else. The film has tried really hard to create ideas and links to the first Cloverfield film, but these events along with the rest of the films strange moments make absolutely no sense, nor are they actually explained, even in the slightest detail. It feels for the most part that this film is less The Cloverfield Paradox, and more: Wacky Things that Happen on a Spaceship. In some regard it may have made more sense if that’s what the film’s title actually was. The space station and it’s surroundings are a real treat for they eyes though.