Don’t believe the hype
Despite claims of its revolutionary power, Netflix has become little more than a dumping ground for otherwise unreleasable films Calum Marsh
and on the fridge of the avant-garde, the direct- to- video and video- on- demand marketplace is a wasteland for rubbish like the ninth film in the Hellraiser franchise. These movies, by and large, are unreleasable theatrically, devoid of both artistic merit and commercial potential.
What’s incredible, however, is that lately the movies on Netflix have been worse.
The Cloverfield Paradox, like Hellraiser: Revelations, is a sequel to a mildly popular science-fiction horror franchise made hastily and without much care. It is rife with generic cliché: world- imperilling crises and time-altering phenomena, icky bloodshed and technological calamities. A space station in Earth’s orbit with a fashionably diverse crew activates some kind of planet-revivifying particle accelerator and, in a catastrophe so telegraphed even conspiracy-theorist pundits are seen speculating about it on television, acci- franchise it was eventually reimagined to be part of, was acquired by Paramount Pictures and ushered into production in 2012. Under the working title God Particle, the film was shot in the summer of 2016; the screenwriter, Oren Uziel, claims he only discovered his script was to become a Cloverfield sequel midway through production, when filming was already well under way. A few extra scenes were devised at the last minute and worked into the proceedings in a bid for negligible series continuity – as this otherwise stand-alone picture’s only association with Cloverfield and 10 Cloverfield Lane is J. J. Abrams’s word. Without that claim and the familiar title, no one would imagine they were connected.
By the time production wrapped, Paramount must have known how dire God Particle was. The film was intended to open theatrically in February 2017, but dox was surprise-released to the world. It was a stroke of genius, from a marketing perspective. The disaster became a bona fide event. And a direct- to- video lemon became a movie we had to take seriously.
Mute, by contrast, seems more in keeping with the ostensible Netflix ethos. The film is obviously the product of an artist’s personal interest and care; a passion project, conceived more than a decade ago by writer-director Duncan Jones and longthwarted by studio unease. Netflix, on the face of it, did right by an auteur. They afforded him the means to realize an idiosyncratic vision and the latitude to make it exactly as he wanted, underwriting the effort and leaving him to his devices. And Jones does indeed speak of Mute with, if not pride (which no doubt took a drubbing from critics who universally lambasted the movie), at least confidence and satisfaction. The film’s production was not a problem of compromise, and if Mute is an awful film (and it is), it’s his awful film. It’s also plainly unreleasable. This wouldn’t fly on multiplex screens – audiences would feel they’d paid cinema prices for a madefor-TV flick. The movie has the look and feel of a direct-to-video sequel. It’s home is not the marquee, but the bargain bin.
Mute and The Cloverfield Paradox are not anomalies of the streaming service’s slate. Leagues of their own sui generis productions – Death Note, The Babysitter, War Machine, Naked and (especially) Bright – have arrived to unanimous dissent and ridicule, criticized on similar grounds. They’ve understandably fared better with the few high- profile acquisitions from prestigious international film festivals on their roster – Okja, The Meyerowitz Stories, and Oscar-nominated Mudbound most conspicuously among them – but the tendency has run firmly the other way, toward dreck. (Their multi-picture deal with Adam Sandler bears mentioning here.) ect- to- video movies by another name. It’s become apparent over the last year that, despite claims of its revolutionary power, Netflix is little more than a dumping ground for otherwise unreleasable films. Far from disrupting the traditional channels of distribution, it’s inheriting the tradition of the secondary market, taking a whole lot of productions that don’t have any hope of thriving at the box office and unloading them as another drop in the glut of content its platform needs in ample supply, while simultaneously repackaging them as big-deal extravaganzas. It doesn’t actually matter how bad Bright or Mute or The Cloverfield Paradox is: they’re there, they’re new and – most importantly – they’re available for subscribers to click on.
In fact, the only substantive difference between what Netflix is doing now and what less respected boutique distributors have been doing in the home video market for 30 years is that Netflix has managed to command the attention of the press.
Critics knew better than to consider Hellraiser: Revelations a serious movie, and the only people who were likely to talk about it, let alone review it, were the niche fans of the genre whose attention the entire thing was designed to draw. But for some reason Mute and The Cloverfield Paradox were reviewed as widely and intently as worldwide blockbusters – reviewed scathingly, true, but nevertheless paid attention to by writers everywhere online and in print.
How many more abject disasters does Netflix need to foist upon its subscriber base before we accept the truth about their overall value? “Netflix Original” is a term meant to denote quality, but it has come to connote something different. Such little promise exists in the label that no one should make the mistake of taking a film stamped with the tag seriously.