I would have much rather seen the ground invasion by the starving Russians…
but hey, at least we had a PSA about fire safety and hugging your children.
Everybody says John Goodman was much better in 10 Cloverfield Lane.
No previous movie experience is required to be completely disappointed by the Cloverfield Paradox.
No previous movie experience was even required to write the script, as far as I can tell.
This is just a bad movie - there’s nothing really redeeming about it. There’s no “So bad, it’s good!!” aspect - it’s just bad. You’ll waste time if you watch this. No, really, don’t watch this. No…you there, thinking you need to watch this so you can know just how much of a waste of time it is. Don’t! Not worth it.
Watched it this evening. Terrible movie. Nonsensical even for a bad SF movie. And the physics make no sense whatsoever.
Also, it seemed pretty clear that the Cloverfield tie-in was just tacked on to another movie. It really doesn’t have anything to do with that.
Zing.
My favorite part of the movie was How the monster reveal at the end is this gargantuan towering above the cloud level where the probe is reenterting earth. Were they really intending to suggest the creature was like 30k+ feet high? Also, since I’m back ranting, what the ehll was the husband trying to do with the “tell them not to come back!”. They were literally going to run out of food and die if they stayed on the station. They had no choice.
Maybe the pod was landing in the Himalayas, and the monster was standing atop Mount Everest. Perfectly logical. Somebody hire me, I can write Cloverfield 4, cheap!
Just finished watching this.
Haven’t even read through the thread, have to get this off my chest: this movie is an unmitigated disaster that fails on nearly every possible level with a degree of ineptitude that almost seems intentional.
Yeah, I spent most of the movie only about 60% sure that what was happening on Earth was really supposed to be the events of the first Cloverfield, and that final shot did nothing to bring me closer to certainty.
Maybe specific places were mentioned, but by the time it occurred to me to listen for it, I never heard the husband actually talk about being in New York. With his accent and so few other characters that he interacted with, I wasn’t even sure he was supposed to be in the US.
So yeah, the end where he’s screaming about monsters, plural, and one of them is popping up above the clouds really didn’t evoke the first movie at all.
Everyone thought we were gonna see a big budget Lovecraftian invasion of Earth, and we got a space station teenage horror movie.
I have always maintained that the best eldritch (or cosmic, whatever) horror merely suggests the hellish apocalypse that it promises. Go ahead, ask me what the best Lovecraftian horror movies are.
Watched it. This movie is dumb. Daniel Bruhl stars in the one space movie where everything goes right and the crew doesn’t go crazy (The Martian), so of course he has to go and fuck that up. Someone mentioned halls of mirrors being a horrible movie trope in the Mission Impossible thread. Demonic horror hitting spaceship is the other.
Also, this
I’m into Eldtrich Horror now, so hit me up.
Oh shit, seriously? Well, uh, ok here goes -
If you haven’t seen it, I would start with The Call of Cthulhu, which is pretty awesomely created as a period piece, black and white with no sound. It sounds a little goofy and it is, but it works because it looks like something that would have just popped out of Lovecraft’s brain onto celluloid. I checked Netflix, not available to stream but evidently is available on DVD.
There’s a great little B movie called Banshee Chapter, we had a little discussion going around a few years back. I think Tom managed to interview the director on the front page. It’s a great little creepy film, really captures the terror of the unknown, in this case around and within the normal environments we and the characters in the movie are familiar with. I checked Netflix, this one isn’t available to stream but is available on DVD.
In the Mouth of Madness is probably one of John Carpenter’s last really good movies. It’s got some great acting, especially from Sam Neill going totally bonkers, and a real reality bending story. It’s the end of the world, man. I don’t feel so good. Yet another not available to stream on Netflix. Sorry, this is a bad roll.
The Resurrected is a film adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, kind of. But it does get the mood right, in slightly smaller scale than the others I’ve listed. I don’t even see this one as available on DVD, and I haven’t even seen this one since the 90s, so I probably shouldn’t even list it. But it’s pretty good if you can find it!
That’s just off the top of my head, and without getting into cheats like Alien or The Thing, which are fairly cosmic horror but not really Lovecraftian. I’ll try to think of some more that are easier to find.
I haven’t seen The Resurrected, which makes sense since apparently its merely existing in some uneuclidian parallel dvd players ¬_¬
In the Mouth of Madness felt really good compared to what it could have been. Between this and Even Horizon, I am beginning to think Sam Neill might be able to turn any B movie into proper horror.
I’ll add a movie that impressed me back when I was in my middle teen years, from Jacques Tourneur, called the Night of the Demon (apparently, there is an “uppace” US 87’ cut, which means tracking down the UK 95’ one). I wonder what I’d think of it nowadays. Smaller scale movie, not end of the world stuff.
So this cost the same as the first two films in the franchise combined. That’s depressing, and I’m not even a fan.
I think there was a missed opportunity to go full creepy horror with the material, especially as the weird stuff began to escalate, but then the movie decided it wanted to be Evil Dead 2 and play some stuff for laughs. Just an example of how messy and disjointed it all feels.
As the credits were rolling I found myself thinking that the movie looked like a rejected script that someone had bought, warmed over, and retrofitted into this Cloverfield “universe”. I’m shocked to learn that was exactly what happened!
It’s (branded as) a Cloverfield movie. Why would you expect anything else?
I kept thinking “what is David Oyelowo doing in this movie?”
The answer was nothing much. What an odd choice for him, other than my assumption that he got paid a hefty sum.
The only redeeming feature of this film is that the cast was diverse, in my opinion. If only they had more to work with.
I did enjoy the bit where the guy was talking to his arm.