TURNING FAULTS INTO VIRTUES
There’s a wonderful moment in William Gaddis’s novel JR in which the eponymous hero, an enterprising s choolboy turned overnight Wall Street tycoon, cooks up an ingenuous ploy to turn a manufacturing error into a stroke of fortune. JR makes matches, but they aren’ t made well, and customers have been complaining they snap in half. So he embraces it. “That’s how we’re advertising them now, with this added snapoff safety feature,” he tells his lawyer. Later a pharmaceutical company he owns finds a run of aspirin has come out green. The kid has a plan for that, too: “That’s how we’re advertising it, just it’s green. Why should it have to mean anything! It’s green, exclam- ation point.” A fault made to seem by clever marketing a virtue: JR should work at Netflix.
A t rite science- f i ction picture doomed from the start to obscurity was conceived by Paramount back in 2012 under the title God Particle. It was produced in the summer of 2016, and by most accounts the studio didn’t know what to do with it. The planned $ 5- million budget had somehow ballooned to an unwieldy $ 40 million, its special- effects looked more like network television than a blockbuster film and there seemed no way recuperate that investment on its merits as mediocre entertainment. But at some point in 2017 an executive had a vision to save God Particle.
Why, the film could be hastily reassembled, retitled and repackaged as an instalment in the Cloverfield franchise, despite bearing no connection or resemblance to either Cloverfield or 10 Cloverfield Lane. It was relinquished to Netflix. And then, the streaming service uploaded the movie to its platform after the Super Bowl last night — by surprise.
And so t he unreleasable nondescript sci- fi trifle emerges in triumph as an event, not a catastrophe. A chastened studio gets to write off a multimilliondollar blunder. A media giant gets to enjoy exaltation for daring to defy tradition and release a would-be smash hit so unconvention- ally. Most impressive, a dull, vacuous nothing of a movie gets to be discussed and written about with real interest — a miracle, because the only thing interesting about The Cloverfield Paradox is how it happened to be released.
Had this film slumped into theatres last February, as Paramount originally intended, it would have come and gone without registering on the popular imagination in the slightest, welcomed with a sheaf of negative reviews and a wave goodbye as it passed forever into insignificance. Instead we’ve been deluded into thinking it’s worth taking seriously. Direct- to- video sequel, exclamation point.
What does it amount to, movie- qua- movie? Astonishingly little. The Earth is in peril: a space station, Cloverfield Station, orbits the planet and prepares to launch an experimental particle accelerator that, if successful, will generate the energy to power the world. An international crew of actors much too talented to be slumming it in what feels like a TV movie of the week — among them David Oyelowo, Zhang Ziyi, Chris O’Dowd, and Gugu Mbatha- Raw — variously bark commands, crack wise and bicker as their mission ( of course) goes wrong and ( of course) endangers them. There are familiar encounters with inter stellar hazards, the usual pressure problems and lifesupport failures; there are fatal brushes with technology ( all predictable), with space oddities ( all silly) and with other people ( all telegraphed, and all irrational).
It was a surprise release, but nothing about the film itself surprises. It looks cheap, feels phoney, and even at 102 minutes is almost painfully tedious.
The Cloverfield Paradox borrows liberally from better science- fiction. There’s the panic- in- isolation slasher scenario of Alien. There’s t he s witcheroo i nto an alternate dimension that’s rather Star Trek. There’s also a great deal of Event Horizon, strangely. Paul W. S. Anderson’s vulgar foray into blockbuster galactic horror is not an obvious reference point in 2018, but The Cloverfield Paradox conjures its spirit. Mainly though the film puts one in mind of sci- fi television — of The Twilight Zone, if one is feeling generous, or The Outer Limits if one is realistic about the scale and scope. Even these meagre entrants in the pantheon of the genre boasted more wit and panache.
It’s typical that the conversation surrounding the film has been redirected by Netflix away from how f amiliar The Cloverfield Paradox feels or how much The Cloverfield Paradox steals and toward instead how radically The Cloverfield Paradox arrived in our homes. It would make JR proud to hear it. The fault has been made a virtue.