The Cloverfield Paradox is not your average, run-of-the-mill Netflix thriller.
It’s a space oddity, for one, and it’s one that’s inextricably bound to Bad Robot’s Cloverfield franchise – for better or worse, we might add. And though fans were understandably excited by Netflix’s stealth release, which occurred immediately after Super Bowl LI, the end product was somewhat underwhelming.
In fact, shoddy storytelling and a muddled script left many scratching their heads by the time the credits rolled. Mystery and intrigue is one thing, but not when it comes from left-field or overshadows sound character development, which is a pitfall The Cloverfield Paradox tumbled into. And fast.
But if it’s answers you seek, the Empire Film Podcast sat down with J.J. Abrams and director Julius Onah in an attempt to solve that mind-melting finale:
Now that we’ve had these multiple timelines have been opened and things are happening dimensionally, there’s many different ways for these things to play out. So there was a real fine connection to make with things dropping into the ocean that you see in the movie when they first realize they’ve landed in this other dimension. There’s still more possibilities that will come with more strands of the story.
When it comes to the franchise, as a whole, Abrams stressed that a Cloverfield movie is built from the ground up – as opposed to being shoehorned into Bad Robot’s anthology series without much care or thought.
On the one hand you can say ‘well then anything anywhere could be a Cloverfield movie,’ but the intention has never been to take a movie and then slap Cloverfield on it. The idea was to say Cloverfield is a kind of umbrella, you know, under which all of sorts of genres and thrill rides can take place.
Looking further afield, Julius Avery’s period thriller plans to steer the Cloverfield franchise back toward Nazi Germany, where a group of WWII paratroopers – headed up by Wyatt Russell (Black Mirror) and Jovan Adepo (Fences) – journey behind enemy lines to discover supernatural hijinks and Nazi experiments gone awry. It was formerly known as Overlord, and it’ll be with us on October 26th.
