Ok, ever seen any of those movies where people go to explore an old building or a ship drifting at sea and naturally find it's haunted and evil spirits start murdering the cast in various ways? Like "Ghost ship" 2002 or any of it's cheap ripoffs?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0288477/Well, if you have you've already seen "the cloverfield paradox". What looks like a SF film quickly turns into a tired and tiresome old "evil ghosts murdering people in a place they can't get out of" movie.
I went into TCP with low expectations. It had, after all, the toxic initials JJA on it and we know what "the destroyer of franchises" has done to star trek and star wars.
But it looked good, at first. Good sets, good effects, good actors. The plot was about creating a new energy source to solve the worl'ds energy crisis but the experiment was dangerous so it was conducted in earth orbit.
So they fire up the Plotronic generator and DING! Earth disappears. Well, sort of.
From then on all semblance to any coherent plot disappears into the black hole of JJA's mind. Events straight out of horror movies start happening in what started out as a SF movie. Worms disappear from some sort of experiment or recycling thing and appear inside a man who explodes. A man's arm is sucked into a wall, bloodlessly severed and starts crawling around writing messages. A missing device is found inside a dead person's stomach. Why? QUANTUM! See, instead of bizarre and senseless things happening because of ghosts and curses they happen because of "QUANTUM!" and 'PARALLEL UNIVERSE!"
So, see, it's not just old movies like ghost ship and house on haunted hill remakes recycled, because the gruesome murders and senseless things happening in those were because of ghosts out for revenge instead of "QUANTUM!" and "PARALLEL UNIVERSE!", see?
So horrible death here, utterly batxxxx insane thing there, quantum, parallel universe, reverse the polarity of the neutron flow, betrayal, the end.
The movie seemed to have it in for intelligent people because as soon as an intelligent person solved a problem in an intelligent way they were instamatically killed in some impossible way that was related to the problem. I guess JJA hates intelligent people. I reciprocate the sentiment.
Well, the strong intelligent black woman gets to solve some problems and survive, possibly, but of course she gets to so we can have her be the one who wins in the end, apparently.
The movie is supposed to finally explain the first two cloverfield movies and has a few genuinely good moments. There are plenty of canned plot moments too, like the heroic black guy who takes a bullet for the team that we saw coming as soon as he appeared on screen. Yes, there is a slusho reference.
All in all, despite a few good moments, good acting and great effects, TCP is about original as the next movie to feature Milla Jovovich or Scarlet Johansen as tough badass women fighting something evil and pulling off a last minute victory against the odds on sheer guts and toughness.
I can't and don't recommend it unless you want a form of intellectual anesthetic to numb your mind in that bad movie sort of way. But there are better bad movies that don't take themselves as seriously as TCP did.