The Cloverfield Paradox (2018) Dir: Julius Onah
- Ridley Coote
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
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This Julius Onah directed science fiction horror film, a Netflix Original, was the third film in the popular Cloverfield franchise. I had watched and enjoyed the other two films quite a bit, and, whilst it isn't necessary to watch the three films in a specific order, I always prefer to go by release date, personally. Reviews aren't as strong for this one, but I figured it could still be a fairly cool film, based on the premise, as well as the cult status of the other two films.
The first thing I noticed was just how disappointing the visuals were. Some of the CGI was legitimately quite poor, especially when some of the more sinister events of the film unfolded. Furthermore, the cinematography choices weren't exactly impressive either. I was hoping, with the space setting, that the film would provide some pretty outer-space shots, or even some nicely framed shots of the station, but those were very few and far between.
The film's two arcs just didn't work well together. The Earth-based narrative was boring and pointless, while the main space-based narrative was over-written and messy. I understand what was attempted with the Earth story, but it felt like it was only included to provide a more visual link to the other 'Cloverfield' films. I kept waiting for something cool to happen, but it never did.
Only two actors really stood out in a positive way, those being the pair of Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Daniel Brühl. I liked some of Mbatga-Raw's earlier scenes, but she got a little inconsistent towards the end of the film. Meanwhile, Brühl was the most consistent person in the film, but still didn't give a great performance, at least by his fairly high standards.
The rest of the cast, while not objectively bad, failed to leave much of a significant impression upon me, which was a shame, because I actually quite like some of the film's cast members. The most noteworthy of these names were Chris O'Dowd, David Oyelowo, John Ortiz, and Elizabeth Debicki, while the likes of Zhang Ziyi, Aksel Hennie, and Roger Davies really did not inspire my confidence.
Overall, this was, sadly, the weakest film of the franchise, and quite comfortably at that. I wanted to like this film a lot more, but it was such a mess, and not particularly well-written. For a film with such a simple plot, it made life an awful lot harder for itself than it needed to be. I also think that, really, the film should've tied itself to the rest of the franchise a little more securely - that may have helped its case, at least a little bit.
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