When it comes to J.J. Abrams's Cloverfield franchise, half the fun its unconventional risks in storytelling—from first-person found-footage style filming to intense secrecy and surprise releases. On Sunday night, in an ad during the Super Bowl, Netflix and Paramount not only announced a third installment in the franchise—they also revealed that it would drop on the streaming service as soon as the game was over. Unfortunately, the surprise release is the most exciting thing about The Cloverfield Paradox, which fails to live up to the gimmick through which it was announced.
The Cloverfield Paradox is a kooky sci-fi thriller that feels little more than an expensive made-for-TV movie. It's mostly about a crew of astronauts trying to build some contraption that'll solve the Earth's energy crisis. But they screw it up (of course) and get lost in a different dimension, where a lot of weird shit starts happening like when one dude's arm kind of just falls off and starts writing the space crew messages. The crew starts dying in weird ways (one guy was, like, filled with worms?), but it's hard to really care about any of these characters, and the plot generally doesn't make much sense or really matter. It's bizarre, mostly confusing, and often uneventful, but for anyone hoping to unravel the mysteries of the Cloverfield universe, the film does provide an outline to the events in the other two films.
Essentially, the crew members of the Cloverfield International Space station inadvertently open up a portal between dimensions that unleashes the monster from the original movie onto the planet. As one crazed Alex Jones-type conspiracy theorist warns in the beginning of the film, these experiments could release “monsters, demons, and beasts from the sea ... not just here, but in the past, future, and other dimensions.” Well, they should have listened to him.
So there you have it: Scientists were so busy trying to figure out what they could do that they never stopped to consider that they'd open up a portal between dimensions that will send monsters on an apocalyptic rampage of the planet.
It's enough to make you wish that Abrams had just kept the monster origin story a mystery. At the very end, when the surviving scientists finally make it back to the planet we get a good glimpse at the monster terrorising the planet. Here's what it looks like:
Now, we don't know for certain if this is the same monster from the other Cloverfield films (they look similar, although the sizes don't match up). But with all the dimension-hopping, this could be a parallel universe to the other films. So, it's unclear if this is a direct prequel to the other films, but the events of the experiments did kickstart this invasion throughout multiple dimensions (it's possible Cloverfield and 10 Cloverfield Lane all take place in three separate dimensions getting terrorised by beasts unleashed from The Cloverfield Paradox's space science). And that's probably as good of an answer we'll get in this franchise.
Matt Miller is a Brooklyn-based culture/lifestyle writer and music critic whose work has appeared in Esquire, Forbes, The Denver Post, and documentaries.
