Director Report Card: Julius Onah (2018)

2. The Cloverfield Paradox

It was a neat idea. J.J. Abrams' and Matt Reeves' "Cloverfield" put a fresh spin on the giant monster movie premise. The hype around the teaser trailer is still unlike anything I've seen since, the discussion and investigation about what it could be truly being an exciting moment in 2000s nerd culture. Abrams' mystery box approach brought with it a bucket of lore, which hardcore "Cloverfield" heads soon dug into. When combined with the box office success, demand for a sequel appeared quickly. However, Abrams and Reeves became very busy with other projects. The idea of doing another found footage kaiju flick seemed to lack the novelty that made the first one work. Around this time, Paramount had acquired a buzzy low budget horror script called "The Cellar." When Abrams' Bad Robot became involved, another interesting idea presented itself: What if "Cloverfield" became a brand, a banner under which distinct sci-fi/horror titles could be presented? It was a clever way to draw attention to medium budget genre projects that probably wouldn't get much notice otherwise. The choice was made in secret and, when "The Cellar" was revealed to be "10 Cloverfield Lane," it led to another explosion of speculation among fans. 

Which brought forth another question: What next? If a "Cloverfield" movie could be about anything, where do you go from there? Every Bad Robot production now prompted rumors that it could be the next "Cloverfield" movie – might there be some alternate universe where "Overlord" was released as "The Battle of Cloverfield Point?" – which drained away a lot of the surprise. After Oren Uziel's spec script "God Particle" was acquired by Paramount and Bad Robot, people quickly pinned it as another potential "Cloverfield" film. This was more of less confirmed as filming rolled with Julius Onah at the helm, "God Particle" being reworked during production into the third "Cloverfield" film... That was in 2016 and there was no news for quite a while after that. The project languished on a shelf for two years, prompting questions about whether Bad Robot had a rotten egg on their hand. 

How do you pull off the kind of surprise marketing coup that the previous two "Cloverfield" pictures did a third time, especially when everyone knew that's what the movie was and many feared it wasn't very good? Netflix, still in their expanding phase, had developed the habit of picking up cast-off studio films. Budget squabbling had kept "God Particle" unreleased, the studio fearing it was too expensive to be a hit. Netflix, savvy marketers that they are, had a great idea. The first trailer for the film was released during the 2018 Super Bowl, with the film being viewable on the streaming service immediately after the game was over. It was a brilliant way to instantly generate hype for the long thought discarded sequel. It also shows the short-sightedness of Netflix as a corporation. People were super excited to see "The Cloverfield Paradox..." And then they watched it, the anticipation vanishing in a burst of disappointment. Since then, "The Cloverfield Paradox" has become a well known example of Netflix's strategy of prioritizing instant gratification over actually making good art. The spin-off hasn't garnered much reappraisal in the years since but, surely, there must have been something about the film that made it worthwhile at one point? 

Set in the near future, the film takes place in a world gripped by an energy crisis and on the brink of war. The crew of the Cloverfield space station floats above Earth and seek to revolve the conflict with the massive particle accelerator aboard the station. The crew, led by British engineer Hamilton and German physicist Schmidt, have had little success so far. Hamilton maintains contact with her husband on Earth, the two trying to recover from the death of their child. Finally, the accelerator works correctly but the success is short lived. The station suffers a power outage afterwards and that's when the crew noticed something disturbing: Earth has vanished. Other strange incidents occur, such as an unknown new member of the crew appearing partially absorbed into the station's hull or test subject worms seemingly teleporting into another scientist's body. The crew soon realize that the success activation of the accelerator has created a paradox, the station shifting between parallel universes. Hamilton works to unravel this mystery and return to her husband on her Earth.

A popular conspiracy theory in the late 2000s was that the Large Hadron-Collider – CERN's massive particle accelerator in Sweden created to study physics in astonishingly new ways – would bring about the end of the universe. That it would open a black hole on Earth. That it would create anti-matter and cause a chain reaction that would destroy all matter everywhere. Or that it would trigger a new Big Bang or transport us to an alternate universe. The fears resulted in a lot of paranoid rambling, many internet memes, and little actual panic among the public. Scientists assured the world there was a miniscule chance of any of these scenarios to happen. The LHC was successfully activated in 2009 without kicking off the apocalypse, at least in any way we could detect. Oren Uziel was clearly inspired by these rumors when writing "God Particle," obviously since the script took its name from the legendary Higgs-Boson particle that the LHC would reveal in 2012. 

I'm not a physicist and the kind of shit that goes on at CERN is way over my head, as I imagine it is for most folks. However, the way "The Cloverfield Paradox" attempts to utilize these high-minded science-fact ideas for a pulpy science fiction thriller never quite comes together. Conceptually, "The Cloverfield Paradox" is about a massive science project opening doorways to other universes, with disastrous results. In practice, the film operates under the logic that shifting between parallel worlds will cause all sorts of crazy shit to happen. The effects of the anomalies bend from people being fused with their surroundings – recalling the supposed details of the Philadelphia Experiment – to limbs disappearing and working on their own, among other far-fetched payoffs. There's no interior logic to it, the script operating under the assumption of "particle accelerators and paradoxes can do anything" and using it to create a number of bizarre horror sequences. The result is a film where the threat never quite meshes, the audience often unsure of why or how any of these events are happening, how the heroes can stop it, or even how they plan on doing that. 

The lack of plausibility in the script is at odds with the pretensions the film clearly has about itself. Mirroring Julius Onah's early short films, "The Cloverfield Paradox" is a movie that takes itself very seriously. The tone the film is clearly hoping to replicate is that of genre classics like "Alien," "The Andromeda Strain" or "Apollo 14." You can see parallels to all of these films, in scenes of the cast running around dingy cyber-gothic hallways, the scientist arguing among themselves over what can be done, and the extremely perilous attempts to repair the damage to the space station. In its best moments, "The Cloverfield Paradox" does grab a little bit of that energy. People stumbling around outer space is almost always a creditable recipe to make tension, as space is such a very perilous place and the exploration of it is extraordinary dangerous. Probably the most striking moment in the film occurs when the team decides to exit the station. The camera pulls back from the airlock, through a storm of debris and chaos, while Bear McCreary's sweeping score plays. It's the only time "The Cloverfield Paradox" successfully grabs any of the sort of grandeur the best sci-fi movies generate.  

While “The Cloverfield Paradox” was clearly inspired by acclaimed sci-fi classics, in structure, the film resembles a much less glossy form of genre product. Very quickly, the film establishes a pattern. Its various scientist characters will argue amongst themselves, this leading to either heated conflict or a last ditch attempt to save the world. Inevitably, the character instead fall victim to the bizarre effects of the anomaly. In other words, the ensemble cast is picked off, one by one, in elaborate death scenes. “The Cloverfield Paradox” is a trashy slasher movie in sci-fi drag, draped with theoretical physics to justify its wildest leaps. I'm not against building a prestige film around such a familiar set-up. “Alien” can also accurately be described as basically a “slasher movie in space” and it's awesome. I'm certainly not one to ever turn my nose up at a sleazy body count flick. 

“The Cloverfield Paradox” certainly cooks up some bizarre and striking eliminations for tis characters. The first major death involves a man's body seeming to slide out of place, his eye rolling around loose in his socket. It ends with a deliberate shout-out to “Alien,” with worms exploding from his chest. That kind of freaky body horror is the film's best element. A woman being discovered to have fused with the interior hull of the ship, the metal cords and wires weaving in and out of her flesh, is a shocking sight. The sequences that follow – a chamber filling with water or a sudden decompression – don't have the same sort of visceral bite as the earlier beats. In fact, they become silly pretty quickly. If “Cloverfield Paradox” is a flashy sci-fi slasher, that means the shock factor of its death scenes are a big part of its appeal. The movie quickly runs out of ways to make its parallel universe paradox idea propulsive enough. 

In fact, the film comes off as increasingly poorly thought-out the longer it goes on. The back story, of a world running out of fuel sources and pushed to the edge of mass war, never seems especially detailed. We hear that China and Russia and the United States are all on the verge of fighting but the how and why is left unexplained. In its last third, “Paradox” relies on sudden shifts in personality among the cast, a character becoming a dangerous villain for reasons that are blurry at best. When you look at the movie's weirdest sci-fi swings, you start to realize that Uziel's script doesn't seem to make much sense. When a character has his arm severed from his body by a size-changing hole in a wall, it's a freaky set piece. The visual of the hand crawling around by itself and writing on its own is too. The lack of logic behind this image though speaks to the film's overall lack of actually thinking its ideas through.

In defense of the screenwriter, he was called in half-way through “God Particle” being filmed to rewrite it as “The Cloverfield Paradox.” That might explain some of the haziness of what the sequel does. Or why the further connections to the wider “Clovefield” universe seem tacked-on. A brief appearance of a Slusho! mascot or a familiar last name are easy to overlook. All of that proceeds the biggest connection though. One that the film simply can't wait to deploy. Further diluting the tension of what is happening aboard the space station, the movie will periodically cut to Hamilton's husband on the Earth. He witnesses explosions, the city being wrecked, pulling a hurt kid out of the wreckage. He also sees some sort of giant beast lumbering in the mist, which tells us everything we need to know. “The Cloverfield Paradox” is a prequel to “Cloverfield” and presents an origin for the giant monsters and alien invasions seen in the other two installments. Sure, as a giant monster fan, it was neat to see the Large Scale Aggressor again. However, it feels like a desperate attempt to pump up a half-assed script by throwing the jangling keys of a familiar sight at the viewers. It exposes the hollowness of the entire enterprise. 

Ultimately, that's what keeps “The Cloverfield Paradox” from working. The film struggles to make it clear that those writing and directing it care about why these events are progressing this way, aside from a delivery system for cheap thrills and fan-appeasing throwbacks. You can see this lack of care in how thinly defined its characters are. Each crew member of the Cloverfield is given exactly one defining characteristic. Gugu Mbatha-Raw's Hamilton is grieving her lost child and strained marriage, the most perfunctory of traumatic back stories. John Ortiz' Monk is neurotic. Chris O'Dowd's Mundy is a smart-ass. Aksel Hennie's Volkov is confrontational. Zhang Ziyi's Tam is overly certain of her own theories. Daniel Brühl's Schmidt is untrustworthy. Elizabeth Debicki's Jensen is unpredictable. A lot of these elements seem to correspond to the characters' nationalities. Mundy is Scottish, Volkov is Russian, Tam is Chinese. Schmidt is German, Jensen is Australian. I don't think there's anything wrong with hiring reliable actors to enliven underwritten characters with their trademark abilities. O'Dowd and Brühl are clearly having the most fun. However, the characters are ultimately thinly defined to the point that we can't care about what happens to them.

In the aftermath of “The Cloverfield Paradox” being released, most of the critical reaction was negative. More than one review referred to it as a “train-wreck.” It is certainly a messy film, with far too many half-formed ideas to be satisfying. The attempts to link it to the other corners of the “Cloverfield” franchise come off as desperate. While it contains some grisly special effects, the film can't sustain that kind of tension throughout. Julis Onah does not exactly define himself as an auteur with this one, which feels increasingly generic as it goes on. “The Cloverfield Paradox” is doomed to be remembered more for its clever release than its actually content, which can't hold together. Despite clearly being made to relaunch the “Cloverfield” series, “Paradox” seemed to have killed it instead. A fourth film, said to be a direct continuation of the original, was announced. Babak Anvari signed onto direct a script from Abrams and “The Ritual's” Joe Barton. IMDb still list the sequel as “filming” but there's been no news about it for two years. I guess we'll see if “Untitled Cloverfield Sequel” will result in the same sort of mess as “The Cloverfield Paradox,” a movie with a handful of cool touches but that doesn't function as a whole. [Grade: C]