Thursday, February 8, 2018

The Cloverfield Paradox: Where Do We Go From Here?







Ten years ago, something found us. The something turned out to be an exercise in viral marketing and the revitalization of a rather worn-out genre of filmmaking, found footage. Helmed by producer JJ Abrams, Cloverfield (2008) became an unexpected hit because - well it was literally, unexpected! Nobody was quite sure what the film was about, or even titled months leading up to its release. While it became apparent, thanks to its carefully crafted trailers and online ARG (Alternate Reality Game) that it was going to be some kind of monster film, the excitement built up as movie goers pondered the applicability of giant treacherous creatures stomping around cities in a Post-Godzilla and Post-9/11 world. Cloverfield was lauded by some and derided by others for its ambitions, but the film nonetheless created a strong cult following. For years fans begged and pleaded for a sequel, and the creators teased the idea numerous times to the public. In 2016 after these pleas from the fandom had seemingly quieted, a trailer was released for a film titled 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016) starring John Goodman and Mary-Elizabeth Winstead. That film was set inside of a bomb shelter after a young woman awakens inside it, having been rescued by a paranoid man following a car crash. The man tells her that the world outside is no longer safe as some kind of apocalyptic event has occurred. The film ended up bearing little to no relation to the first movie other than similarities in themes and a few Easter Egg nods to the previous film's canon. The producers claimed they were at a creative crossroad, believing Cloverfield could either become an anthology series, with each film being independent of one another narratively or alternatively the film's plots could be connected in some way by a future film bridging the two together. Fans like myself were excited either way, as long as more skillfully crafted thrills were coming our way in a reasonable time.

Only a couple of months following the release of 10 Cloverfield Lane it was revealed that a film previously titled The God Particle would be the third entry in the Cloverfield Franchise. The film was to tell the story of a team of astronauts testing a particle accelerator on their space station with disastrous consequences. This film's pre-production was handled similarly to that of its predecessor. It was taken over by Abrams and his team in the middle of production and reworked into a story that adheres more to the Cloverfield Aesthetic. The film's release date was pushed several times within the last year, and rumors surfaced that the film was moving to Netflix, a rumor that proved to be true when during the Super Bowl a trailer appeared announcing the film would debut on the streaming service immediately following the game. Questions were raised regarding the motivations for this move, was it to appease the audience or relieve the stockholders at Paramount?

Now that leads us to The Cloverfield Paradox (2018). The film contains a cast of diverse international talent including the magnanimous Gugu Mbatha - Raw (who will most certainly win an Oscar someday) as well as John Ortiz and Zhang Ziyi among others. The cast does their jobs successfully. Chris O'Dowd does particularly well as the comic relief character while David Oyelowo is rather wasted in a lead role that leads to nothing much in terms of depth. In this revised version of the original script concept, these astronauts are testing out this particle accelerator as a possible boundless energy source for a world going through a severe energy crisis below. When their mission finally proves successful, and the particle accelerator fires off properly, the celebration is short-lived as the crew soon find that the Earth has disappeared, possibly destroyed by their experiment and that's not the only thing gone awry.

The Cloverfield Paradox is, unfortunately, the weakest entry in the Cloverfield Cinematic Universe to date, but cannot be written off as a flop altogether. It possesses incredible potential in numerous areas, including the talent of its cast and the beauty of its set design, but the story missteps and falters too many times in its second and third acts for it to be indeed considered a success, not only as a third Cloverfield film but as a science-fiction film in general. If a language of questions guided the first two films, this film is guided by a language of theories, hundreds of different ways to put the pieces together to form some sort of coherent picture. Still, after a while, it just starts to feel like the laziness of storytelling rather than an avant-garde methodology. Many of the bizarre occurrences in the latter half of the film are explained away as being a result of the astronaut's unintentional intrusion into a reality that is not their own, but that doesn't forgive plain old silliness. A character's detached appendage writes down the location to where a crucially missing piece of the ship's navigational instruments is, and that location is ridiculous and nonsensical in itself! There is a fine line between the unusually grotesque and the grotesque use of the unusual. The idea of a dimension fighting back against intruders in violently fantastical ways is intriguing, but Paradox is all promises, no deliveries. The trailer said it would give the answer as to why the first film's monster attack occurred, it does in a way, but the answer is flaccid because it hinges upon the convoluted idea of multiple alternate realities in which stakes and continuity are thrown out of a figurative air-lock in favor of an infinite amount of interpretations for the causality. Apparently from here on continuity will not be an issue for each Cloverfield Film, because each occurs in its own version of reality. This would come off as more inventive if it didn't seem like JJ Abrams and Co are just too busy with other commitments to properly tie these stories together. Now I am not knocking the "alternate dimensions" idea in totality. Rather I have serious issues with how the creators worked it into this film and the franchise itself. The idea of separate worlds, similar yet different in distinct ways, is an interesting notion, and in regards to Ava's (Gugu's character) personal character arc, it is used with some iota of emotional depth, but this is not enough to justify its inclusion into the narrative. If you're using a plot device like a paradoxical time-warp theory, you better be prepared to back it up, this film is not prepared to do so.

The B-Plot of this film is so obviously inserted as a poorly constructed afterthought that it is painful to watch. Ava's husband, Michael, awakens in the middle of the night following the accelerator mishap in space to find the city in a state of extreme distress after some large scale attack. He goes off into the night to the hospital. He's a doctor of course to help those injured. He finds a little girl amongst the rubble of a destroyed building and leads her to safety after learning that the hospital is destroyed. The two find shelter in a convenient bomb shelter made by a friend of his (a possible nod to the second film of the series) and are forgotten about until the ending. This subplot serves little to no purpose whatsoever other than to tease the Cloverfield fans with the idea that the monster has returned to cause more havoc thanks to the failed energy experiment. Why does any of this matter in the end? We never learn much to anything about the situation on the ground, and the ending gives us little explanation as to why Michael is distressed to learn that his wife is returning to Earth? We could guess, but after a whole film of guessing, we're exhausted and just want a damn clear answer! Which brings us to the last image of the film...

You've probably read by now about how the monster seen at the end of the film, though appearing similar to the original Cloverfield Monster, is much larger in size. So what does this mean? Is this the same monster grown-up or repositioned in time due to the particle accelerator incident? Is it an older, adult version of the same species, is it the original creature's mother? Why does Michael use the plural term when referring to "these things" are there more of them? I have no idea and frankly neither did the filmmakers I believe. Clover (as fans have affectionately nicknamed him) is simply thrown in at the end in a semi-respectable CGI shot to give fans some kind of fanatic dog treat. Listen not everything has to be explained or spelled out, a large part of the allure in the Cloverfield Franchise comes from the creators allowing space for the audiences' minds to wander and explore. Still, there comes a time to deliver some semblance of an answer so that the exploring can continue in a meaningful way. The map has to be drawn out to some extent. Plainly, I don't know enough about the situation going on on Earth during the film's climax, and that makes the final reveal feel cheap and underwhelming, rather than suspenseful and exciting as it should be. This franchise deserved better, this cast deserved better, and the patient fans most definitely deserved better than what this film ended up giving us. It comes off rushed and half-hearted and the worst crime is that it didn't have to. Had the team behind it given more attention and care to the abundance of plot and story elements it already had at hand the film could've been a more than worthy third entry in the series. It should be noted that I find little to no fault with the film's director, Julius Onah, who does the best he can with what he's given to work with after JJ's team came in and took over the production. His direction is efficient and pleasing to the eye, it just gets jumbled into the mess that the producers and others brought onto the film later.

 At the end of the day, The Cloverfield Paradox deserves to be admired for its ambition in its marketing strategy, releasing itself following the Super Bowl by surprise and for its well intentioned attempts to tie this confused franchise together. It's an entertaining thrill ride that occasionally feels inspired rather than indebted to better equipped Sci-Fi films of the past. As for the future of this troubled franchise, my greatest hope is that Abram's and his team dedicate a bit more of their creative attention to a devoted and hard working fan-base that hasn't (for the most part) given up on them just yet. The tagline for this film was "The Future Unleashed Everything" for this film's sake and for the sake of this film franchise, let our expectations hold the belief that "everything" has yet to be unleashed.