The Cloverfield Paradox draws more attention to Abrams’ bold “Mystery Box” release strategy than it does to itself, revealing both the allure and the pitfalls of such a surprise-driven approach.
After delays pushed its release to 2018, the third installment of Cloverfield both thrilled and surprised fans with not only their first look during a Super Bowl ad, but also immediate access to the entire film. Surprise announcements are not unusual but outright releasing a film with virtually no advanced marketing, akin to a Beyonce masterpiece, is a move that should only be reserved for content strong enough to stand on its own. Nevertheless, J.J. Abrams has always been one to champion the power of mystery.
At a TED conference, he laid out his fascination of the unknown: “What are stories, but mystery boxes? . . . What’s a bigger mystery box than a movie theater? You go to the theater, you’re just so excited to see anything — the moment the lights go down is often the best part.” His mystery box fascination stems from an item he purchased during a childhood visit to Tannen’s Magic in Manhattan; the magic mystery box was advertised as $50 worth of magic for $25. To this day, Abrams claims to have never opened the box, therefore preserving the limitless possibilities of what its contents could do and ensuring it remains more powerful than an opened box of tricks. It’s fitting that his partnership with theory11 to later develop Bad Robot playing cards led to a locked mystery box with a deck wrapping of just a question mark, leaving it to the consumer to reveal the content or forever wonder what it could be.
Abrams continues to push the power of the unknown and did so masterfully a decade ago. 2008’s Cloverfield directed by Matt Reeves was teased in a trailer ahead of a Transformers film – marketed as 01-18-08. The marketing campaign leading to its release involved mysterious websites, Easter eggs, and short video content, inviting fans to decipher clues and map out the film’s backstory.
A 2016 film directed by Dan Trachtenberg was developed from a script called The Cellar. Its eventual codename Valencia was later teased ahead of another Michael Bay film, 13 Hours, with the new title of 10 Cloverfield Lane, directly tying in some supernatural and monstrous events of the ‘found-footage’ film 8 years earlier. This excited the world, which was now aware that potentially any thriller or dark story that Bad Robot developed could be adapted to fit into what is now the Cloverfield Universe.
This third installment began as a story called God Particle, which hinted that its reference to the Higgs boson might involve the long struggle of astrophysicist to piece together the cosmic puzzle, or perhaps a story that addresses our very own makeup and deal with matter itself. Until last night, not much else was known about the film which was suspected to have an announcement soon to tease its release. The ad directing viewers to Netflix to watch The Cloverfield Paradox dramatically shortens the announcement-to-release window to an unexpected minimum.
This surprise announcement has ironically become expected from Abrams, which raises questions about whether a critic-free film release might be due to a weak film. Sadly, what everyone else is realizing today is that the film falls far short of its predecessors and poses some more questions than maybe the filmmakers had not intended.
In the year 2028, the multi-national cast aboard the Cloverfield Space Station seems to have been plucked from a United Colors of Benetton ad to solve the Earth’s energy crisis by perfecting a particle accelerator designed to supply endless power. Julius Onah directs the multi-national crew comprised of Daniel Brühl, Aksel Hennie, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Chris O’Dowd, John Ortiz, David Oyelowo, and Zhang Ziyi who deliver just enough caricature representations of their background and purpose aboard the Cloverfield. Soon, calculation errors lead to a time and space disaster, and a god particle story opens the possibility for a ‘god in the machine’ (deus ex machina) story where anything is possible because the very story is being undermined in the same way that any time travel story can cheaply do anything it wishes.
“Logic doesn’t apply anymore,” says one character upon realizing the cause of their bizarre situation which overtly identifies how the film can unravel from this point forward. Ava (Mbatha-Raw) sees this as an opportunity to reboot her life, much in the way that Abrams’ Star Trek had a time-travel reset to its storyline. Despite Ava’s plea, her motivations are selfish and, like other installments of the Cloverfield series, she wrestles with the morality and mortality of her choices in this new and supernatural predicament. It’s not until the understandable choice of risking (or destroying) a few lives in order to save 10 billion on Earth that we finally see one’s choices dictate how the story will turn.
Beyond a tear-inducing family video message viewed by Ava, the crew fails to exhibit the kind of depth that would need to elevate this film beyond a conduit for space drama. At its heart, The Cloverfield Paradox is a drama about a space crew doomed to never return home safely unless overcoming impossible odds. If not for the simple twists and tie-ins to Cloverfield, it would fall short of 2017’s Life if only for the lack of impressive special effects.
Traditional releases that bypass critics often do so in order to avoid bad reviews. It’s hard to determine if the sale from Paramount to Netflix was a result of low confidence in this inferior film leading to a sleight of hand release, or if it’s lackluster reception is partly due to millions on Netflix while recovering from Super Bowl food comas.
What we do know is that this film won’t kill the franchise as the 4th installment is already wrapped and set for release late 2018. Reportedly called Overload, the next film stars Wyatt Russell and Jovan Adepo and is directed by Son of the Gun-helmer Julius Avery and concerns a Nazi experiment involving supernatural forces. After Paradox, it’s hard to say if this is possibly the first Cloverfield story set in the past circa WWII, or if it’s an alternate reality a la “The Man in the High Castle.”
Whatever the answer, the next film’s marketing release will be one to watch. Considering Abrams shifted from cryptic and trickled information in 2008 to laying it all bare the night of in 2018, we know the release of Overload will be another strategic move. Hopefully will result in a film that can stand on its own.
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The Cloverfield Paradox
Director Julius Onah
Writer Oren Uziel
Stars Daniel Brühl, Elizabeth Debicki, Aksel Hennie, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Chris O’Dowd, John Ortiz, David Oyelowo, Zhang Ziyi
Rating Not rated
Running Time 1h 42m
Genres Drama, Sci-Fi, Horror