Now to the matter at hand: The film now known as Cloverfield Paradox. In case you aren't aware, I'm gonna give you a quick rundown of its history and how (if) it fits into the larger Clover-verse.
Fair Warning: There will be spoilers
The whole shebang started 10 years ago (2008) with Cloverfield which, if you recall, snuck into theaters behind a title-less found footage teaser trailer. Love it or hate it, Cloverfield revitalized the found footage genre by making it bigger: a bigger budget than you average camcorder spookum; a bigger scope and, of course, a much bigger Big Bad.
If You Haven't Seen It:
A group of twenty-somethings in New York are recording a going away party when a big ol' monster starts attacking the city. And then they try to survive.
It's pretty fun and has some really unique sequences for a film of its kind (again, with that larger budget, you can afford borderline action movie set-pieces which we really never see from the P.O.V. of someone involved in them).
Two years back (2016) we got the excellent 10 Cloverfield Lane which began it's life as a contained thriller called (I believe) The Cellar. This one's trailers showed off the young-woman-trapped-in-a-bunker plot (and John Goodman!) and relied on the title to connect it in viewers' minds.
If You Haven't Seen It:
The Great John Goodman (King Ralph and long may he reign) is keeping Mary Elizabeth Winstead & John Gallagher Jr. in his bomb shelter bunker to keep them safe from, if he is to be believed, a near-apocalyptic event happening outside (as he says in the trailer "It's not safe out there. Something's coming.")
10 Cloverfield Lane is a great movie because it completely holds up on its own and the tengential connections to the Clover-verse expand on the world we left at the end of Cloverfield. Things have changed. They appear to have gotten both weirder and worse. It's awesome.
Some time ago, a description of a film called (at the time) The God Particle was bought by J.J. Abrams' Bad Robot studios and, the internet being the internet, rumors immediately began circulating that it was the next Clover-verse movie. Late last year, these suspicions were confirmed when The God Particle had its title changed to Cloverfield Station.
And the internet rejoiced. We were excited. More rumors circulated that Station would explain Cloverfield and/or was a prequel to it.
Sounds fun, right? Yeah.
A release date was set: April 20th, 2018. (This, incidentally, is why I've been looking in to Cloverfield Station so much: I write a recurring column about certain types of movies over at the excellent MOVIEJAWN and was doing research for the next installment).
So here's the big bummer about Paradox: it's essentially 2 movies and neither of them is all that great. Are they fun? Sure, I think one of them is. Is the cast (featuring, among others, David Oyelowo, Ziyi Zhang, Daniel Brühl & Chris O'Dowd) good? Eh. With the exception of Gugu Mbatha-Raw, none of them are much of anything. They have no real meaningful interactions and if you asked me to describe them, it'd all be broad strokes: this is The Nominally Religious One; this one is The Funny One. Meh.
So movie #1 is everything taking place on board the formerly titular Cloverfield Station: After two-ish years in space trying to get "The Shepherd" to work, they're running out of time & fuel. The Shepherd is a particle accelerator, I think like some version of the Large Hadron Collider and if it does what it's supposed to do (which I don't really get because it's reduced to a digital display trying to reach a 50% mark) it could end the Earth's energy crisis. Mbatha-Raw plays Ava Hamilton, the station's Communications Officer. Everyone else plays Assorted Science-Types, Engineers and a Medic.
They finally get The Shepherd to do its thing with the expected unexpected results: Stuff goes wackadoo and when they get everything under control, they can't find the Earth. That's not a bad concept in my book. You take the "alone in the vast void of space" terrors of Gravity and mix it with the sort of "we have to steer the ship home" drive of ...most of the boat-lost-in-a-storm movies and I could get down with that. (The fact that that *isn't* this movie doesn't even bug me. I'm just saying that's a cool concept they could have explored more).
Movie #2 is everything happening on Earth, with Roger Davies playing Michael, a doctor and Ava's husband. Explosions happen on the horizon, a CG monster shadow moves through CG smoke while he looks through rubble for a child calling for help, and eventually they settle in a bunker.
That's kind of it. He tries to contact his wife, tries to contact the kid's parents (in Philadelphia; Go Birds!) and I tried to care about any of it.
So where does this fit in with the rest of the Clover-verse? It technically functions as an origin story for the monster (affectionately nicknamed Clover btw) from the original film. But we don't see any of that, really. We don't see the dimensional rift deep in the ocean like in Pacific Rim for instance. What we get is Donal Logue on a TV screen trying to sell his character's book forewarning the possible effects of the Station crew firing The Shepherd.
And it's dumb as hell. Dude literally says "Monsters from another dimension could come into ours". Pretty much just like that. Now, I know that the character had to say that so succinctly because it would push the bounds of believability to have a talking head on a bobo CNN interview segment give a long, well crafted explanation for a crazy concept like monsters from parallel realities, but then why not have a crew member raise these theories in an environment that would allow for a longer discussion?
Maybe the suspicious Volkov (Aksel Hennie) has a cabin full of weirdo literature and he has an ongoing dialogue about Mark Stambler's (Logue's) theories with some of the crew. We've established Monk (John Ortiz; not Tony Shalhoub) is religious; maybe the two of them have a Scientific Fact v Religious Faith (Dawn of Justice) discussion about the nature of angels and demons.
Also having Stambler just say "monsters, demons, beasts from the sea" and consider that a satisfactory explanation is kind of insulting. It's so wickedly on-the-nose as to be laughable. Imagine a scene from a Texas Chain Saw Massacre origin where a deputy (who, because it's my brain, sounds like Fred Gwynne) says to Grandpa Leatherface something like "You know, a boy growing up in this house is likely to, uh, make a mask of human skin and murder teenagers while squealing like a pig...".
Besides that, as I mentioned, we get Dr. Michael wandering through the outskirts of (presumably) the first Cloverfield movie, but he never really encounters much of anything so it's kind of a wash. Of course, though, there's that final shot where a Cloverfield monster rears its head through the cloud cover (?) How big *is* this thing, anyway? I've always had some problems understanding the scale of Clover (back in the first one). Remember at the end when Hud (T.J. Miller) gets eaten? That monster seemed a lot smaller. I seem to recall chatter online that it was maybe a separate, younger monster, maybe even Clover's offspring (the Godzooky to Clover's Godzilla) but I don't recall where the consensus came down on that one.
The ties to 10 Cloverfield Lane (and of course there are some because as long as we're just tacking shit on...) are even thinner. Logue's Mark Stambler shares a last name with John Goodman's Howard, who I remember mention his daughter a whole lot, but not a son, so... maybe a brother? Or maybe I'm just misremembering?
Besides that, Dr. Michael takes the child he rescues to a bunker. If that's not a direct parallel, it definitely made me think of 10 Cloverfield Lane at least. Honestly, if it wasn't for that Stambler connection, I wouldn't even have mentioned the bunker, but, well, here we are.
Disclaimer: I've never read either of the scripts for The Cellar or God Particle, so I don't know how much of either was changed to fit the Clover-verse, but I can say that 10 Cloverfield Lane feels a lot more solid a movie. I couldn't see the seams in it. Maybe The Cellar didn't end with a scout-ship, or maybe it did, I couldn't guess because the whole movie holds together. But I have a pretty strong intuition that God Particle didn't have anything like Dr. Michael's Earthbound story line. It just feels so tacked on and, ultimately unnecessary (except he does deliver the best line of the movie: "Tell them not to come back! Tell them not to come back!", so I guess it wasn't a total wash? ...No, it was.)
He could have appeared in the opening scene, the post-opening credits, video-communication scene and at the end (to deliver that line) and that would have been pretty okay with me
The Cloverfield Paradox isn't all bad though. The crew's story line, though rushed (presumably condensed to fit in the Dr. Michael sub-plot) and ultimately marred by clunky direction, actually is a lot of fun. You, as the viewer, have to meet the story more than halfway a few times, and must definitely be willing to suspend your disbelief, but if you can get past that you'll at least have some fun.
There's the introduction of Jensen (Elizabeth Debicki), which borders on Cronenberg levels of body horror, but the reveal itself is botched by crummy direction and/or clunky editing and comes off feeling like the sequence was edited for TV. Volkov 3-D printing a gun was great, as was his succumbing to the worms. What pulled me out of it was both the gyro-whatever being in his guts and how convenient it was that I suppose the same thing had happened to the Volkov in Jensen's universe? (okay) Far and away though, was Mundy (O'Dowd) and his arm! The effects in the scene where he loses it were cool and the arm, apparently having sentience of its own was totally wild.
At its best, the action on the station tapped into the no-holds-barred anything-goes vibe of the best of 80's horror, at its worst it felt like a watered down, mostly bloodless version of Event Horizon, which, as I said, is still pretty fun.
This would be a total recommendation if it weren't for the Cloverfield stuff tacked onto it, but as it stands I'll probably end up rewatching it in October, after the 4th Clover-verse movie comes out.
Oh yeah, you read that right. As of now, the popular rumor is that the film Overlord is an intended fourth film in the Cloververse. It's apparently the story of some American soldiers behind enemy lines on D-Day, in a Nazi occupied village, discovering something supernatural is going on. Part of Logue's Cloverfield Paradox info-dump mentions that activating The Shepherd could have effects on the past and the future as well, so... presumably that's where this film (which I've been thinking of as Cloverlord) will fit in.
Last couple of random bits & bobs, then I promise I'm done.
I guess we don't really know that Cloverfield and The Cloverfield Paradox take place in the same universe, do we?
And, hey. What *is* the paradox part of The Cloverfield Paradox?
Hey back when we were all scouring the internet for clues as to what the Cloverfield monster would look like, this was my favorite design:
I do really like that, if nothing else, this movie sufficiently explains why the first movie is called Cloverfield. In that movie's opening military footage, the event is referred to as "the Cloverfield incident" (or some such, I think), which would make sense if it was all tied into the side effects / failure of The Shepherd firings on Cloverfield Station. But why is the station called that? Maybe Cloverlord will tackle that one.
Overall gang, I would recommend just giving 10 Cloverfield Lane another watch. It's a solid film on it's own, but when it does tie in to the Clover-verse, it does so in a way that feels invigorating to the franchise. Plus, John Goodman!
Long may he reign
No comments:
Post a Comment