The Cloverfield films have been a very mixed bag for my tastes. The original film from Matt Reeves was an ambitious project that succeeded in capturing a quickly crumbling world under mysterious attack, dripping with tension and frights with every set-piece, but I personally thought its found footage angle (like all found footage movies) started to stretch its credibility thin. Eventually, Paramount decided to produce more films set within the world, with 10 Cloverfield Lane following in 2016. However, while that film was even more intense than its predecessor, populated by a great central cast, its bolted on ending linking it to that earlier film severely undercut its impact, and this third film feels hampered by the fact that it has to use that as a reference point.
If there's anything truly good about the film, like the earlier films, it does have a strong sense of atmosphere and tension, following a small crew aboard a space station designed to give Earth infinite and sustainable energy, but dark twists and circumstance leads them struggling to survive and return home. That's about as much as I'm willing to give away plot-wise, but I will say that what follows does have sequences of truly effective intensity, as paranoia and terror lead the crew to grow increasingly suspicious of each other, while trying their best to work through those suspicions for the good of the cause. Some reveals come across as obvious, but clearly this film had the ability to be a great thriller, making use of a slightly underdeveloped, but highly effective ensemble cast, especially Gugu Mbatha-Raw as a grieving mother working through fear and heartbreak for the safety of the crew.
However, twenty minutes into the film, everything started crumbling to pieces. The film struggles to find consistency as it tries to decide on a tone. Throughout the film, I found myself unintentionally thinking of Interstellar, as it feels like this movie wants to attempt eerily similar ideas, and there's a strong sense of existensial pondering, raising moral quandaries and questions that it could have set time aside to answer if it wanted to. Instead, it also tries to blend those ideas with that of a psychological horror film, that at best tend to be at odds with the heady material, and at worst drive the film into ridiculously campy territory, and highlight how hollow this movie is in definitive plot threads. In a way that makes me think the writers couldn't find enough material with one of their ideas, the film constantly finds itself running into a plot cul-de-sac, and so it has to go through massive contortions to keep the plot moving, resulting in a script loaded with insane logic gaps and baffling stupidity from its characters. I lost count of how many times the movie made me go "Wait! What?!"
And speaking of contortions to keep things moving, the pervasive Cloverfield DNA is starting to show its one-trick limitations. The film intends to be some culmination of everything to happen within the first two films, giving us some answers behind the origins of Clover (the monster), as well as links to 10 Cloverfield Lane's final scene. However, it's clear that this was originally supposed to be a standalone film, and never intended to be part of the Cloverfield universe. Too often, the film feels like its contradicting its own timelines and internal logic as it acts as some unifying bridge, doing so by way of really preposterous science. Acceptance of it feels less like a leap of faith, and more a colossal misfire, as such ridiculous concepts clash fiercely with what wants to be taken seriously, leading the trend of the Cloverfield world dragging potentially interesting films down to continue on, except this one doesn't even have the decency of being entertaining.
*1/2 / *****
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