Now available on Netflix
Directed by: Julius Onah
Starring: Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Daniel Brühl, David Oyelowo, Chris O’Dowd, Zhang Ziyi, Elizabeth Debicki
What is a Cloverfield movie? What is the connective tissue running through these Bad Robot produced properties? What makes an idea “Cloverfieldian”? The biggest question of all – does J.J. Abrams and the guiding production forces know anymore? Long story short, I’m not sure it matters. What matters is that Paramount didn’t think much of this, and sold it off to Netflix.
Netflix finally did it. In control of a massive streaming infrastructure, Netflix released 56 movies last year – most of which were released with minimal fanfare. In possession of the Spotify or Tidal of movies, they made waves on Super Bowl Sunday with a multi-million dollar ad, promising that a new Sci-Fi movie with Gugu Mbatha-Raw was coming out. And then they pulled a full Beyonce, and surprise-released the film, and it was immediately available. It’s a seismic chess move – one that created premiere-like excitement and mass-internet conversation with the original movie. No matter what, it’s a win for the format and a win for non-theater-goers.
The movie has two strands running artlessly through it. In one, Hamilton (Mbatha-Raw) and her husband Michael are stuck in a gas-shortage line, while the radio gives a backstory of worldwide food and energy crisis. Hamilton decides to volunteer for a mission that puts her in a space station for over a year, and Michael just stays and does Michael stuff, which include being a doctor and rescuing someone from a hospital and then staying safe – that’s it. The Michael stuff on Earth is rough. And it was pasted onto the movie after the fact, and has all the Cloverfield touches on it.
The more interesting part is what happens to Hamilton when she gets to the space station. There’s a clever montage to start where the one-year expectation gets stretched to many, many years. We meet the international crew, and they’re the biggest strength of the movie. The crew is in place to fire up a particle accelerator to find an infinite energy source, to help stave off the threat of a world war for the scarce resources on earth – they do so in space, because there is the potential to end existence. Chekhov’s particle accelerator.
Hamilton is joined here by the American leader Kiel (Oyelowo), German chief engineer Schmidt (Bruhl), Brazilian doctor Acosta (John Ortiz), Irish interstellar scamp Mundy (O’Dowd), Chinese scientist (or engineer? Or mechanic?) Tam (Ziyi) and instantly suspicious Russian person Volkov (Aksel Hennie). It’s not that clear what everybody does, but they all have an interesting, lived-in dynamic as a team – the viewer is dropped in the middle of their relationships, which is nice. Chris O’Dowd is particularly fun (although he’s clearly in another movie) and everybody is generally very good. Then, Chekhov’s particle accelerator sets off and things get kooky. I won’t reveal all the hi-jinx, but suffice to say that interdimensional travel is involved.
The weirdest part of the kookiness is the nature of the differences they start to notice. Basically, the multiverse is like an omni-powerful Kevin McAllister, and the crew of the Shepherd (yes, the ship is called that) are the Wet Bandits. The multiverse is being pretty obvious that it wants these guys out of its alternate dimension, and unfortunately all the dimensional pranks play the same note over and over. There are some interesting spooks and some flair to the spectacle, but bear in mind that this was a small movie before Paramount retrofitted it with a Cloverfield skin.
Young director Julius Onah has some fun things in the movie, especially with the production design in the ship, but in the end, you won’t remember this movie – I’ll straight up promise you that. The Cloverfielding of this movie is super clunky (the ending is the most massive scale eye-roll of the decade), but the Chekhov’s Accelerator part is not enough of a movie to stand on its own either. Cloverfield itself was a phenomenon in 2008, and rightly so – the first trailer was so arresting with the Statue of Liberty head bouncing down the street and cutting to no title, but a date. A better retrofit for the franchise was 10 Cloverfield Lane, which is clearly a seperate movie that wears the ending Cloverfield tangent suitably enough (though the best part of the movie clearly is the original part, when it was called Valencia). And here we are ten years later with another one. I have to imagine that timing is no coincidence, since the last anyone heard of this original movie (called The God Particle), it still needed work. It kind of still does. I’ll be more excited for a Cloverfield movie that was Cloverfielded from conception, rather than from opportunity.
In the end, the movie is nothing new or that interesting. If you liked Event Horizon, this is that, but it’s now. If you like your Event Horizon movies now-er than 1997, then you’re in luck, because this movie came out in 2018, which is as now as it gets. The now-est, in fact. And now, it’s got a Slusho reference and a Bad Robot credit.
Is it Watchlist-Worthy? Not really – only for Cloverfieldian completionists.