The Cloverfield Paradox – Only just ‘Cloverfield’

It seemed that the majority of movie-goers enjoyed the first ‘Cloverfield’ film where an alien the size of Godzilla rampages its way through New York (even if most of us didn’t quite understand why the film was called ‘Cloverfield’ in the first place.  Then came it’s ‘sequel’ (notice the use of quote marks there?) which used the ‘Cloverfield’ name in its title and yet bore little similarities to the original.  Now, we have ‘The Cloverfield Paradox.’ I guess that at least this time I didn’t expect it to instantly tie in to either of the previous two – and I was kind of right.

‘Part III’ seems to be a pretty generic horror movie set in space with a couple of scenes thrown in there which sort of pull it into the ‘shared universe’ that’s apparently being created.  It feels a lot more like ‘Alien’ or ‘Event Horizon’ where the crew of a space station orbiting Earth suddenly find themselves teleported to the other side of the sun, wondering how they got there and what the mysterious happenings are on board.

It’s worth noting that this film has been released straight to Netflix, which is becoming the new way we used to say ‘straight to video/DVD.’ It’s budget is acceptable and the sets are reasonably space age, until you have things that happen involving severed limbs which can move on their own.  Then I started raising an eyebrow at the blatant use of CGI.  The ‘strange happenings’ on board soon start becoming fatal and our cast begin to drop one by one, leaving it feeling more like an old-school ‘slasher’ film set in space.  It does its best to try and make up for this by being a little more scientific than your average ‘monster movie in space’ and for that, it does succeed.

There are those films where you can easily check your phone or pop out for a cup of tea.  Probably not best to do that here, as it won’t just be a case as you’ve missed a crew-member’s demise, but the story has skipped settings (I won’t go into detail about what I mean by ‘settings’ as I don’t want to give away too much!) and you’ll actually miss a vital plot point.

Now, it may just be my love of the ‘IT Crowd,’ but – for me – the stand-out performance went to Chris O’Dowd, who possibly relied on his ability for humour to own every scene he was in.  The rest of the cast are also functional for what they’re used for, but you probably won’t really remember any of the characters; names (I even just referred to Chris O’Dowd’s engineer-character as ‘Roy!’).

If you have Netflix and are generally a fan of sci-fi and/or horror then this is a decent enough little film to while away an hour and a half.  However, don’t look at it as much to do with the first two films – see the ‘Cloverfield’ films as more of a sci-fi anthology than a continuous series.  This is one sequel where you really don’t need to have watched anything that came before it to really understand what’s going on (okay, maybe apart from the very last shot of the movie!).

7/10 if I woke up on Groundhog Day and had to watch this again, I could live with that