Starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw, David Oyelowo, Zhang Ziyi, Daniel Bruhl, John Ortiz, Aksell Hennie, Elizabeth Debicki, Roger Davies and Clover Nee

Directed by Julius Onah

The Earth is, at most, five years away from using its energy reserves. The solution, or at least the hopeful solution, is Cloverfield Station. The largest object ever put in orbit, Cloverfield Station houses the Shepard Particle Accelerator. Once that’s fired up, the planet’s energy crises will be solved.

Ava Hamilton is still mourning the loss of her children when she gets the call to join the Cloverfield Project. Her husband Michael tells her to go, and she reassures him it’ll be a short mission.

Two years later, they’re running out of time and hope when the worst possible thing happens. The Shepard works…

The Cloverfield Paradox, unveiled with unprecedented fanfare after the Superbowl, has been beaten up and down the internet by my colleagues for a few weeks now. The general consensus is it’s not very good. The stupider opinions include it being so bad it could actively hurt Netflix.

We’ll put those to one side because they deserve neither time nor attention. An individual movie hurting Netflix is like a senior British politician not coming across like a pompous, terrified leaking sack of incompetency and kickbacks. It’s possible, but it’s not that likely.

So is The Cloverfield Paradox any good? Yeah! Kind of. Mostly. Depends how you look at it.

As a ‘stuff goes sideways on a space station’ movie it’s got a ton of fun elements that never quite fly in formation. The always fun Aksel Hennie, basically playing his character from The Martian but less calm, gets some fun stuff to do and carries the weight of the exposition for the first half. Daniel Bruhl too does good work as Schmidt, the physicist responsible for the increasingly faulty accelerator. There’s some nice tension essayed between the crew, and the movie does a decent job of building its world.

However, it’s when things go wrong that the film goes right. The Outer Limits-esque idea of the station being pushed sideways into an alternate universe is cheerfully pushed to the extremes and leads to a couple of very pleasant unpleasant surprises. Elizabeth Debicki’s character making her debut encased in a wall was not what I was expecting at all, and her entire plot is really compelling. There’s vast otherworldly tragedy at work here and while the film always chooses ‘THINGS EXPLODE IN SPACE’ over it it never quite goes away. Plus, even the old elements are given new spins. After all, when was the last time you saw the final confrontation in movies like this not involve any men?

But it’s when things get weird that the film has its most fun. The conceit of this being the inciting incident for every previous movie and all the ones to come is flat out brilliant, rendering this moderately successful story into a piece of narrative architecture. This is both the framework around which every other movie is built and the ticket to ride for any one of a dozen different sub genres. Alien invasion? Particle Accelerator! Colossal monster from beneath the waves? Particle Accelerator! Nazi super soldiers! PARTICLE ACCELERATOR! It’s like someone took the framing conceit of Tales from the Crypt, gave it a plot, some characters and fired it into orbit. It’s audacious and fun and excuses everyone of the film’s missteps.

Plus I’m 90% positive that Mundy’s fate here is a colossal trail for the true nature of the bad guy in Operation: Cloverfield, due later this year.

Verdict: So, is The Cloverfield Paradox good? Yeah! Mostly! Kind of! It’s a film that wears its influences on its sleeve, tries to be three things at once and manages two and a half. There are some great performances, some great ideas and one of my favourite ever closing shots. Not the best Cloverfield by some distance, but one of the most interesting and, arguably, the most important so far. 7/10

Alasdair Stuart