Film

The New ‘Cloverfield’ Is Being Trashed By Critics, But That Probably Means Nothing TBH

It's being called "an unholy mess" by critics.

by Patrick Lenton  6 February 2018
Cloverfield

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Surprise! Netflix’s new Cloverfield film has already been ruthlessly savaged by the critics, literally only hours after it was dropped on to the streaming service. They’ve even gone so far as to call it “an unholy mess”.

Netflix made a big play on Super Bowl Sunday, first by showing a trailer during one of the extremely expensive advertising slots, and then announcing that the mysterious third film in the J.J. Abrams-produced sci-fi franchise — dubbed The Cloverfield Paradox — was going to premiere right after the game, rather than through a traditional cinema release.

It was a first-of-its-kind advertising move, which certainly managed to grab lots of attention. It even managed to get this incredible hype in the lead up from Ava DuVernay:

Clearly the hype has worked, as reviewers have obviously flocked to watch the film and write their hot takes only 24 hours later — but unfortunately the takes are not great.

So far, reviews aggregator Rotten Tomatoes has the film sporting a grim 16% based on 42 reviews. The score on Metacritic is a slightly more healthy with a 40 (out of 100 reviews). There seems to be a kind of competition over who can write the most brutal review, as if critics are grumpy from having to stay up and watch the film they were so casually ambushed by.

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For example, over at Collider, Matt Goldberg wrote:

“After the initial excitement dies down, you’ll see that Julius Onah’s The Cloverfield Paradox is a tepid, predictable, and largely uninteresting sci-fi film where dumb characters do dumb things and bad things happen because the script needs them to.”

Or perhaps the Hollywood Reporter’s summary: “A trainwreck of a sci-fi flick bent on extending a franchise that should have died a peaceful death almost exactly one decade ago.”

Chris Evangelista at Slashfilm even goes so far as to theorise that the surprise Super Bowl drop wasn’t so much a clever and fresh marketing strategy, but rather a kind of damage control that was decided upon after realising how dire the film actually was.

“The negative way would be to say that the producers behind The Cloverfield Paradox, including J.J. Abrams, realized the film was such a colossal dud that they knew they’d be better off dumping it onto a streaming platform instead of going through the trouble of a wide theatrical release.”

Of course, there are a few positive reviews out there, but they’re harder to find amongst the deluge of negative reports. It feels like reviewers seem more entitled to smashing the film down like a brace of angry toddlers with a sandcastle, perhaps due to the unconventional method of release, which skirts the privileges reviewers enjoy as their “due”, such as fancy, media-only screenings.

Of course, there’s also a good chance that all these negative reviews will mean absolutely nothing in the long run. As we saw with Netflix’s ‘hot orc’ fantasy crime film Bright, the savaging of reviewers doesn’t actually stop the public from watching critically maligned entertainment.

Much like with The Cloverfield Paradox, Bright was piled upon by critics who called it “bloated and expensive” and an “absolute mess”. While Netflix never releases figures, these Nielsen measurements hint that viewers enjoyed Bright enough to justify both Netflix’s $90 million investment, and to forge ahead with a sequel.

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If you look at Cloverfield’s audience ratings rather than the film critic’s reviews, you can already see a wide discrepancy, with 62% of the movie’s audience reviews listed as positive. There’s a very good chance that the actual viewing audience is going to completely disregard the negative reviews by professionals and make up their own minds — and considering its successful initial marketing plan, it mightn’t even need any of the publicity generated by reviews, making reviewers completely disconnected and superfluous.

The Cloverfield Paradox is currently streaming on Netflix.

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Patrick Lenton is an author and Staff Writer at Junkee. He Tweets @patricklenton.