So, this one has gotten a bad press,
and to be fair, I can see why. It's a bit of a mess, narratively
speaking, and the shoehorned in link to Cloverfield,
while it no doubt helped get the thing made, works really poorly.
Nonetheless, I enjoyed the film. It's a schlocky sci-fi horror in the
vein of Event Horizon,
with a dash of Alien,
a touch of Gravity,
and plenty of derivative but mostly effective nonsense. Spoilers
follow.
The Cloverfield Paradox started
life as The God Particle,
a spec script by Oren Uziel, until it was picked up by J.J. Abrams,
who rewrote it to become part of his Cloverfield mythos.
The original Cloverfield,
which came out way back in 2008, was good fun and a new take on the
Daikaiju genre, before
the fake found footage style had become overused and stale. This was
followed up, unexpectedly, by 10 Cloverfield Lane
in 2016, which I haven't seen but is reportedly another movie which
was rewritten to tie into the Cloverfield universe.
The God Particle focused
on a particle accelerator experiment that still forms the core of the
finished movie. (Presumably it was somehow about the Higgs boson, and
there's a line about that fundamental particle in the finished
script, that doesn't really tie into anything.)
The
finished film is set in 2028, when an major energy crisis has put the
world on the brink of all-out war. Germany and Russia, in particular,
are at each other's throats, but seemingly the whole of Europe is a
tinderbox. To find a new source of perpetually renewable energy,
Space Station Cloverfield has been set up in Earth orbit, to begin
experiments with a gigantic particle accelerator which will
potentially unlock infinite energies from space/time. The search for
energy combined with unknown perils is common enough in sci-fi now
that it's almost become a subgenre in itself. The space station is
the modern day haunted house, or in Doctor Who terms,
an isolated base under siege. Tensions are high among the
international crew after two years locked up together without
results, and then, finally, the accelerator works and produces a
stream of powerful energy. Unfortunately, it runs out of control,
damaging the station and knocking everyone for six. When they
recover, there's no sign of the Earth.
It
takes these top tier scientists a long time to realise that they've
moved along Earth's orbit and that their view is being blocked by the
sun, and longer still to realise that they've actually passed into a
parallel universe. Increasingly bizarre horror situations occur for
under-explained reasons. It mashes together a number of sci-fi ideas
that don't work terribly well together logistically. In fact, none of
the plot really makes much sense, so I can entirely understand why
some commentators had such a hard time with it.
On the
other hand, I think they made the mistake of taking it too seriously.
While it sets itself up a scientific drama, it very rapidly becomes
clear that this is anything but, and it's best watched as the
melodramatic nonsense it is. There's a lack of tonal consistency, but
this can work if taken far enough, and it just about does here, with
outright horror mixing with earnest futurism, conspiracy theorism
mixing with heartfelt family speeches and extreme danger mixing with
bizarre moments of humour. Again, the Doctor Who comparison
works: just like DW,
the film throws together a bunch of ideas and genres and sees what it
can get away with. The best moments are the most out-there: the
shifty Russian guy goes crazy and then explodes into a shower of
worms; Chris O'Dowd's laconic engineer gets his arm bitten off by a
wall, only for it to crawl back to him and write him a note. (“My
arm saved us!”) Neither of these events is met with any real
explanation, other than that having two dimensions in contact
produces weird results.
So,
it's nonsense, but creepy, entertaining nonsense. It wouldn't work
nearly as well if it weren't for a really excellent cast. Gugu
Mbatha-Raw is the star of the ensemble, as believable and likeable as
ever as Hamilton, a woman who has lost her children and so endures
separation from her husband, using her mission as a way to cope and
atone for her sense of responsibility for the tragedy. She's an
excellent lead and holds the film together, but the whole cast are
pretty great here. Daniel Bruhl plays the German physicist Schmidt,
who is the target of some conspiracy theorising himself, which turns
out to be true in one universe but not the other. David Oyelowo is
the rugged station commander, Kiel, the beautiful Zhang Ziyi is Tam,
the Chinese chief physicist (who speaks only in Mandarin throughout).
Completing the crew are Aksel Hennie as Russian engineer Volkov, John
Ortiz as Monk, the medic, and the aforementioned Chris O'Dowd as
Mundy, although I still see him as Roy from The IT Crowd.
One of the nest turns comes from Elizabeth Debicki, who plays Jensen,
the chief physicist of the other reality, who is discovered almost
fused with the station itself after it materialised in place of its
counterpart. She acts as a rational but dangerously unknowable
element throughout.
A
weaker element of the script is that it continues to jump back to
events on Earth, as Hamilton's husband (played well by Roger Davies)
learns of the station's disappearance while trying to deal with
catastrophe all around him. To begin with this works with the
narrative, as we're not always sure which reality we're following,
but once it's clear that the wartorn Europe seen on news reports is
Jensen's home, it's clear that something stranger is happening in the
primary reality. Helpfully, some nutcase has already appeared on TV
earlier in the film, spouting his own conspiracy theories about how
the experiment will tear open the universe and unleash demons into
the past, present and future. It's a terribly hackneyed piece of
exposition that robs the eventual reveal of any mystery.
I
mean, we know it's linked to Cloverfield so
we expect the final reveal that the great big monster from that film
(or another great big monster rather like it, the timing is askew
here and the two films don't even necessarily occur in the same
reality). The script is never sure whether it's meant to play this as
a surprise or ass an origin story, and it falls between the two
stools. The link to Cloverfield is
the weakest element in a confused production, but there's still a lot
of fun to be had with this silly film, as long as you don't take it
too seriously.
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