Last week I talked about Cloverfield and 10 Cloverfield Lane – the first two movies in the Cloverfield trilogy.  Today, I’m going to wrap up by talking about The Cloverfield Paradox (the movie that kicked this little two-part analysis off), and the trilogy taken as a whole.

There are spoilers – you have been warned.

The Cloverfield Paradox

Coming into The Cloverfield Paradox, I knew that this was going to be more of a “true” sci-fi compared to the prior two movies.  What I didn’t know, however, is what type of sci-fi this was going to follow.  I would put The Cloverfield Paradox in the class of sci-fi that doesn’t really care about the science part, and just wants to have an interesting movie in space.  For me, this usually presents a barrier from the movie being good, but it’s not necessarily bad either.

Thankfully, The Cloverfield Paradox sets the tone right off the bat – this isn’t going to be The Martian, it’s going to be The Core; it is going to throw physics out the window and tell a story in space without it.  To wit: in a bleak near-future, all of Earth’s energy supply will be gone in 10 years so we build an international space station with a particle accelerator that we hope we can use to create energy from nothing.  When they finally succeed (on accident?) weird things start happening throughout the station and worse things start happening on Earth.

If you’re looking for weird, this movie has it for you – people stuck in walls, projectile worms and independently intelligent arms that will answer questions by writing.  In that sense, this movie doesn’t take itself too seriously, and was enjoyable.  Sure, the moment you look away you realize how internally inconsistent it is, but when you sit back down, something else weird happens and it’s all okay again.  On the other hand, the script itself is quite weak – there are shoehorned moments of drama that fall apart too quickly and anything resembling a character arc is lost in the shuffle.

As a movie, The Cloverfield Paradox achieved one goal – it was entertaining.  But, I think it didn’t achieve anything more, which means it’s unlikely I’ll find reason to watch it in the future.

The Cloverfield Trilogy

Given the three Cloverfield movies, what can one make from the trilogy as a whole?  I think the most interesting thing to me about it is the fact that each movie has completely different genres and yet are similar enough to share a similar world.  In particular, the writers did an excellent job of implying that all three movies are connected without actually saying it, which was really awesome.  In many cases, this added to the suspense of the later movies – given what we know about the earlier movies, how does this one (loosely) tie in.

Just the fact that each movie inhabited its own genre was also interesting.  This makes the trilogy an interesting project – can we even really call it a trilogy?  That being said, I would be interested in other movies that fell under this project, if they also inhabited different genres and explored different themes.

Overall, I would give the trilogy three out of five bulbous monsters.  10 Cloverfield Lane was definitely better than that, while Cloverfield was lower.  The Cloverfield Paradox landed a little bit below the line, but the project as a whole is pretty interesting in its own right.