The Cloverfield Paradox - The next Cloverfield movie on Netflix

The Void is on Netflix and is good (just bear in mind it had basically zero budget.)

Thank you, QT3 hive mind, for saving me the trouble of watching this. Though now I feel I’ve missed out on a shared collective experience. Years from now you’ll all be making Cloverfield Paradox references and I’ll be like “What? I don’t get it!”

Oh right, I’ve heard very good things about this one, haven’t seen it yet myself.

Banshee Chapter is available on Amazon streaming fwiw.

Another pretty darn good Lovecraft adaptation is Dagon.

I thought about putting that on the list, but personally I don’t really care for it. There’s something a little too goofy about it to be very scary to me, but since it is a direct film adaptation of a Lovecraftian story, it’s probably worth mentioning.

Answers:

  • something was obviously screwed up in him by the transition - either he merged with his doppelganger (implied) or he was otherwise messed up. The worms were from the experiment on the ship, so he either ate them or they were put inside him by the transition, like presumably the gyro, which he presumably couldn’t eat.
  • arm was either not his, but his doppelganger, and they got connected and broke apart - or the reality just got distorted, so the arm might have still been attached to a thinking body in the other reality which may already have discovered where the gyro was.
  • woman was in the wall because she was from the other reality and got merged with this station instead of staying with her version of the station, which fell into the sea.
  • largely to establish her character, give her a reason to consider staying in other reality with him/kids, and so we could have someone still in her reality to hint to us what was happening there.
  • it is NOT the same timeline of Cloverfield 1. In her reality, the events (or very similar ones, starting with the tanker being destroyed in the harbor) of the first movie began decades later, in the future timeline she and hubby were from, not 2008, which was clearly the timing of the first movie.

Yes, that was the suggestion. The original monster was intended to be a baby. Now there were multiple adults around.

This wasn’t good - the cast and writing and the confused haunting/ghost elements seemed misplaced given the sci-fi premise — but it was still really cool how the movie was suddenly just available, for free, on the day of the trailer. If I had gone to the theatre (as I would have, since the original Cloverfield was so special) this movie would have just been annoying - but the way it became available made it feel like a reward, rather than a burn.

And I liked the tie-in to the original movie, and the premise that opened the possibility of an ongoing anthology series where all sorts of wacky things could happen due to dimensional breach/alternate realities/broken time/space. I definitely wish the writing and direction hadn’t been so amateurish (and most of the acting - everyone other than Bruel was just terrible and almost universally unlikable) - but I’m still o.k. with that since the way it was released make it just feel like a not-great but somewhat ambitious Twilight Zone/Black Mirror type episode.

Watched this yesterday as I stayed home sick with a mild fever.

Now normally when I watch horror movies with a mild fever, it adds the experience. This time I spent much of the movie wondering whether the nausea I was feeling was the flu moving into my gut or my distaste for the movie. I’m pretty sure it was the former, but like the movie, cause and effect are kind of muddled here.

Spoiler-free, this was a mashup of Event Horizon and Sunshine, while being orders of magnitude worse than either of those movies. But it’s also free (assuming you have Netflix) and mercifully only 90-odd minutes long so if you want to follow along bashing the movie the price of admission is low.

Now for some spoilers

Wow what a mess. None of the horror elements made the slightest lick of sense. The sci-fi elements were likewise awful.

So they sort-of switched places with another station in another reality, but imperfectly. That nicely explains the woman in the walls. It kind of explains why the worms ended up in the Russian gun (since people got switched, maybe other organic life flopped around too?). It really doesn’t explain why the gyroscope ended up in the Russian as well, but I guess it was a halfway decent horror-pun on the nesting Russian dolls they showed in silhouette a couple scenes before.

The arm thing was just out of left field. Who the hell is on the other side of it? Presumably the alter-O’Dowd was killed in the destruction of the alternate station. And if it was yet another iteration of O’Dowd from some third reality, then how does he know about the Russian having eaten the gyro? What is the “prime” O’Dowd’s arm doing? Can he control it? Should he too be warning the crew of whatever other universe’s station it’s on?

Why did Ziyi Zhang’s character drown/get frozen in the airlock? That was just pure “haunted house” crap. And if anyone was wondering – no, water doesn’t flash-freeze when exposed to hard vacuum; Zhang’s character would have been sucked out into the void surrounded by a sparkling mass of water droplets which would have sublimed and frozen into a icy mist as she suffocated over the course of the next couple minutes. Also - terrible design to have your precious water system hooked up to your airlock.

Same thing with the silly magnetic thing that killed O’Dowd’s character. No real explanation for it other than “haunted house”, and that final scene of him getting magnetic crap stuck up his nose had no relation to what had been shown previously. Ugh.

Honestly, the best thing I can say about this movie is that 100% of the “horror” scenes shown in the Superbowl ad turned out to be utterly benign in their actual implementation. The creepy “go hug your children” line turned out to just be her telling her alternate self to… go hug her kids. The disembodied arm was comic relief. The dangling tentacle-monster was just a shot of a worm experiment.

Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuumb.

They tried to explain that away. It wasn’t their water system, it was condensation (presumably from the breathing?) getting into the air system. Which she fixed, which then somehow immediately resulted in hundreds of gallons of condensation suddenly flooding the one place a person was standing inside a sealed container.

Or in other words, who the fuck knows…

Summary

[spoiler]Someone explain the foosball players spinning madly out of control?

Or the metallic putty reaching out and strangling people?[/spoiler]

Ugh. The condensation was supposed to be fixed by “ventilating” the chamber… which they showed him doing later on. And again, this is sort of a silly sci-fi thing… why was the Big Honking Machine in the pressurized area to start with?

I got nothing for the foosball table… other than maybe showing that they were tenuously connected to another reality where someone was playing the game? And it “bled” over?

This movie made no sense and was really inconsistent, but I had an okay time. I wouldn’t really recommend it to anyone, but I’m not shouting at the heavens to give me my 90 minutes back.

Well, the scientist guy said something about all being justified by what we know of quantum entanglement.

Went over to IMDB to find the quote. It’s not there, but that small selection of lines actually capture what’s most memorable about this movie.

There was a shot of the foosball table right after one of the scenes when they get Jensen out of the wall, which I thought was a clever visual touch—jumping to the closeup of the foosball players who are all impaled by metal tubes.

I don’t remember if that was also the shot where the table moved on its own, but I just sort of lump that together with the only significance being the parallel to Jensen, no narrative meaning.

I don’t remember it exactly, but it was close to “If what we know about quantum entanglement is true, that will bring us back to our universe!”

I almost tweeted the line as I watched it because it was so stupid.

Now that I think about it, if you see this as a clever shlocky comedy it might work on some level. The problem is, I don’t think that’s the tone he was going for. This turned out to be kind of Rocky Horror Picture Show bad. Or insert your movie here. I’m not sure of another movie like that.

See, now you’re doing it again. I kind of want to watch now, Rocky Horror is awesome!

It’s like Rocky Horror but with John Goodman instead of Meatloaf!

I still haven’t seen it, but I heard it’s a musical too. Here’s a screenshot from the movie.