During the 2018 Super Bowl, a new movie trailer was released to the public and the movie itself was to be released on Netflix right after the game was finished. The film turned out to be the third film of the Cloverfield Franchise, The Cloverfield Paradox.

The Cloverfield Franchise has been one of the most creative film series of all time in terms of marketing while also making very entertaining movies along the way. The first Cloverfield was the high standard of found footage films for many people and 10 Cloverfield Lane was a superb thriller that topped the original in almost every way. But what both movies have to thank for their success is the marketing for both of them. How they were sold to audiences were genius at the time, and even today; but with their latest movie, the trailer was released the day the movie came out.

The Cloverfield Paradox is a giant disservice to the franchise that JJ Abrams is trying to build here, being a film with terrible characters, a horribly written script, and a story that has too many ideas to juggle for its own good. Almost every known Sci-Fi cliche and story element can be found in this movie and it never puts any type of significant take on it. No character ever feels like a real human being or acts rational to anything happening whatsoever. They honestly feel like items from a check list made by a committee of producers without any type of conviction or effort put in.

The script is full of story threads that we have seen before and does not do anything creative with them. The twists, while unexpected, come right out of nowhere and are not explained properly. The dialogue as well is really badly written and full of bad humor thrown in for no reason. Also many of the scenes feel unfinished and poorly made compared to the scenes on the spaceship.

According to reports, the entire movie was not even supposed to be a Cloverfield movie. It was going to be originally called The God Particle and not have anything to do with the Cloverfield universe, but JJ Abrams got on the production of the film and then wanted to turn it into a Cloverfield movie. From watching the movie, it is abundantly clear that is the case. This movie is so messy and that is probably why it went straight to Netflix.

The Cloverfield Paradox fails as both an entry to the Cloverfield franchise and as a movie that can be enjoyed. Hopefully Paramount and JJ Abrams can recover from this and get this franchise back on track and give us entertaining movies. Because if this is what we can expect, it’s better that they stay on Netflix.