Rating: 3 / 5 stars

“The Cloverfield Paradox” is directed by Julius Onah and is the third installment in the Cloverfield anthology series, focusing on a space station called, surprise surprise, the Cloverfield Station. The crew running it consists of Ava Hamilton (Gugu Mbatha-Raw, “Black Mirror”), Captain Kiel (David Oyelowo, “A United Kingdom”), Schmidt (Daniel Bruhl,  “Captain America: Civil War”), Tam (Zhang Ziyi, “The Wasted Times”), Monk (John Ortiz, “Kong: Skull Island”), Mundy (Chris O’Dowd, “Molly’s Game”) and Volkov (Aksel Hennie, “The Martian”). Their mission is to find a way to use a particle accelerator to solve the Earth’s energy crisis. But when the experiment goes horribly wrong, the crew discovers that the entire Earth has vanished, and when strange things start to happen aboard the ship, they fear they may have activated the “Cloverfield Paradox” and crossed into a different dimension.

Clearly, this film came as a massive shock when it was released because there had been rumors surrounding this film ever since the release of the last film in the Cloverfield saga, “10 Cloverfield Lane.” The rumors continued when, just like the previous film, the viral marketing campaign started up again, only this time, there were more rumors that Paramount would be selling the film to Netflix. And low and behold, during the Superbowl this past Sunday, a commercial announced that it would be dropping straight to Netflix as soon as the big game was over, shocking and awing the world.

This film has been receiving criticisms across the board for being terrible, with most critics claiming that the amazing marketing was nothing more than a cheap ploy to get people to watch what would have been a very disappointing theater experience. In some aspects, they are right. For the next film that was supposed to be set in the Cloverfield saga, this film did not feel very theatrical. The sets looked very cheap, right out of a CW show to be completely honest. The effects could have been a tad bit better, and the whole closeted feel of it makes it feel like an episode right out the Twilight Zone rather than a big-budget, theatrical experience.

With that being said, this film really is not as bad as most people are making it out to be. It has an interesting enough premise and an incredible cast who, for the most part, all do a really good job with the small parts they are given. Once the tension and scares are established, it harkens back to some of the great sci-fi horror films audience members have gotten in the past. There is this amazing tension that the film establishes by not telling its viewers what the hell is happening once the space station crosses dimensions. For a majority of the film’s runtime, it provides for some very entertaining laughs, scares and thrills.

The halfway point is when things start to go downhill. By the time this film ends, J. J.Abrams and Paramount made the same mistake they made with “10 Cloverfield Lane,” which also happens to be the same mistake that Charlie Brooker made on this most recent season of “Black Mirror”: Trying to tie together an anthology series that thrived on being a series of stories related solely by theme and not by characters, storylines and universes. While all of the events on the space station are happening, there is a separate storyline concerning Ava’s husband, who is still on Earth, and the way that plays out it almost feels like a completely different movie. It suffers from very obvious reshoots in a very poor attempt to tie it all in with the original “Cloverfield” and it turns the last act of what was turning out to be yet another promising engaging, sci-fi thriller into a jumbled mess by the end.

Image from Netflix via YouTube.com