Review of The Cloverfield Paradox (2018) by Alpharebel — 06 Feb 2018

So I have to be honest up front, I would have scored this movie 4/10 but I have to knock 2 points off which I would explain in a bit but lets cover the actual movie. (and yes there be spoilers ahead, lots of spoilers actually).

The principle of the movie has at heart quite an interesting idea but not novel, it's yet another energy mguffin causing a tear to another reality / dimension (so far so much like Killswitch and about a dozen other movies in the last few years.).

Script is meh, acting is passible and the SFX's do their job, the main problem is it works very hard to hit all the typical sci-fi / horror tropes but never actually has the guts to properly deliver and in the process gets itself wound up into a muddled mess where the only "character" who actually has a clue how to fix stuff is a guys disemboded arm (not that it's ever explained how it knows what it knows or even how it stays animated) It's all very by the numbers just without a payoff (keeping it PG like those movies with bloodless swords etc) It's like the writer(s?) literally wrote this thing by trawling TV tropes. The "tinfoil hat guy who's right", This thing needs the keys turning at the same time (for no reason), The x times we have done this to fine another way that doesn't work (Chain reaction, also about energy sources), There's "the infected" (see Promethious), Solid objects sucking people in, Animated body parts, The (not)Gruesome Autopsy, an airlock malfunction (okay this one was a least somewhat original, mostly because for reasons best known to the whoever wrote this garbage, the airlock in question pumps water not oxygen), The tools / structure comes alive and has tendrils to suck in a chacter, we have the deception to pull a heroic sacrifice off to save the ship and the sucked out of the window / porthole. And yet ALL these ideas are done better in other movies with much better delivery and pay off.

So yeah this movie would be another run of the mill flick that doesn't set the world alight but it's worst crime is simply they have very obviously gone back and filmed scenes with the leading actresses screen husband and set them around the original cloverfield (with nod to 10CFL) to try and tie it into the cloververse (and it's painfully obvious and badly done because of the utter absence of this in the scenes set on the station) so yet again they are just using the cloverfield name as a sticking plaster onto unrelated movies because they don't feel they are strong enough to stand on it's own merits.