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Reed Alexander's Horror Review of 'The Cloverfield Paradox (2018)'

PG-13 "Event Horizon"

By Reed AlexanderPublished 5 years ago 3 min read
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A boring and uninspired prequel... I could write a better fucking origin story than this. Fuck, I DID write a better origin story than this. I mean, I had to clean it up so I didn't get sued, but if you read through it, you can kinda figure out what inspired it. Check it out in my notes in the link attached.

But I'm not going to pat myself on the back for my written works, you can be the judge of that. Instead, I'm going to go on about what you could do rather than watch this movie.

First! Let me tell you what it did right. It had a great cast. There. There's the beginning and the end of it. All the actors and acting was pretty solid. Good by even Hollywood standards. Dialog was pretty solid too, so the writing wasn't total shit, but then again, that still falls on the actors.

Everything else? It was kind of just...eh. Nothing to really sink the fucking hooks in. The atmosphere didn't capture the claustrophobia that should be present in a space saga like this. There were only a few truly creepy moments and one of them was actually kinda silly. The story was unimaginative and frankly not at all based on science (I'm not getting into it, that would be a review all of its own. Fucking fight me).

It also connected the Cloverfield origin poorly. More on that in the spoilers.

Over all, it really just wasn't a movie worth watching and let me tell you why...

SPOILERS!!!

This movie just wanted to be Event Horizon. Only, Event Horizon had fucking guts. It had fucking terror! It was cerebral. It got under your skin. It was fucking gritty. The Cloverfield Paradox had a crawling arm... I mean, that was kinda creepy but there's this point where it just gets silly. I mean, the fucking arm communicates with the crew at one point. You just can't take it seriously and the scene just has no grit.

In the meantime, Event Horizon has guys ripping out his own eyeballs, a dude is fucking flayed open with his organs strung up like fucking garland. It was like The Cloverfield Paradox was trying to be the PG-13 version of Event Horizon.

And what the fuck does any of this have to do with the monster movie Cloverfield? Well, apparently, the monster from Cloverfield is from another dimension and was accidentally warped into our dimension by the experiment on Cloverfield station. Wait, I thought according to the second movie, it was an invasion that was preempted by a chemical attack. So, what...the invading aliens from another dimension just spend all day in their dimension waiting for science accidents so they can invade other dimensions?

Mind you, I've always been a fan of movies where scientists inadvertently bring monsters into our world. And hey, that's a great story by itself. It just needs a writer and director with some fucking backbone.

I digress. Either two is a separate universe and is unrelated, or this is the dumbest origin story EVER. The problem is, they seemed to be trying to justify the plot of this movie by desperately attempting to link it to the original in the series. Why? It has fuck all to do with the original. Why not just make this a separate movie? But then that brings me back round to the fact that this movie is just lame Event Horizon and it makes more sense to watch that than this.

So, in short, if you're thinking about watching The Cloverfield Paradox, just watch Event Horizon instead and then pretend nasty monsters crawled out of that ship and landed on earth.

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About the Creator

Reed Alexander

I'm a horror author and foulmouthed critic of all things horror. New reviews posted every Monday.

@ReedsHorror on TikTok, Threads, Instagram, YouTube, and Mastodon.

Check out my books on Godless: https://godless.com/products/reed-alexander

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