The Dark Year: The Cloverfield Paradox

2018, Julius Onah (Captain America: Brave New World) -- Netflix

I have been fascinated with the idea of multiple dimensions and a "multi-verse" for a very very long time; it likely emerged from how comic books handled it, but started with that Mirror Universe episode of Star Trek: The Original Series. I even started up my own story idea (90% in head, 10% on paper) back in 2010ish (and every year after) with inspiration from that year's version of Gamma World, in which the Large Hadron Collider causes realities to smash together, and it was all supposed to happen on Dec 21, 2012, which was supposed to be an apocalyptic date predicted by the Mayans and Nostradamus. IRL nothing happened. 

Are you sure? Have you looked at the news lately? 

The multiverse is probably irrevocably tainted by the arguably failed implementation of the idea in the Marvel movies. It is, at least in the general pop culture eyes, which is fine by me, as this allows it to revert back to the nerds' realm. We will continue to write our stories and explore the idea of multiple realities and crossing over. I might even eventually write mine, set more than a decade after our world (and logically many others) is changed, left post-apocalyptic in theme.

Anywayz, long rambling preamble to say that this movie is both exploring alternate realities and the impact upon such by particle colliders. It even smashes cinematic realities together by taking a previously unrelated script and mashing it with the Cloverfield not-franchise, more or less explaining the first movie.

In this movie, set "20 minutes into the future", the world is on the brink of war and collapse due to the lack of power, fuel-based power, not political power of which there is plenty of. Despite the failing infrastructure and fraying political landscape, a coalition of nations builds a particle accelerator in a space station, hoping to provide "free unlimited energy" for the planet. After a few years of failure (many many days in space), they finally turn the thing on, but suffer an overload. When they all stand back up again, they look out the window and the Earth is not there anymore. That is the elevator pitch for the movie.

And now begins the scifi - horror mashup movie as the crew of the space station: a) have to figure out what happened and whether they can find the Earth again, and b) start to experience all kinds of weird shit generally left to horror movies in space where people are suffering Space Madness. At least in this movie, there is very little madness, beyond a guy not dealing well with his eye going all wonky on him.

Some of the experiences are classic "two realities smooshed together" kind of stuff, like finding a stranger jammed into the wall, behind a plate, wires and pipes running through her. She claims she is one of the crew, but not this crew. And details in their logs state things other than they remember. But the rest of the strange shit is just wonky random shit, such as the worms (their protein source, I guess?) disappearing and then reappearing inside one of the crew, reappearing in a vomit fountain of worms. The best random occurrence is when the wall tries to eat one of the crew's arm, and succeeds on detaching it, sans any blood or trauma (beyond psychological), and when it returns, still separated, crawling about, with some sort of ... independence, like it was this universe's version of Thing from The Addams Family. Its fun, but it makes no sense at all.

Meanwhile back on Earth, the husband of one of the crew is experiencing his own extraneous plot -- something is causing destructive havoc on the planet.

I recall not being very impressed with the movie, especially the shoe-horning in of the Cloverfield plot, which was also done with 10 Cloverfield Lane but at least that was a good movie on its own. This time I just enjoyed the classic Stuff in Space going on with a familiar, capable cast consisting of Gugu Mbatha-Raw, David Oyelowo, Daniel Brühl, Chris O'Dowd, Ziyi Zhang, and Elizabeth Debicki, and a few others. I just wished the plot had tried to make more sense, instead of falling back on the idea that paradox means "anything can happen". Its an excuse to be random, to do "looks cool" stupid shit but doesn't serve a plot very well.

So, the Cloverfield tie-in's? Well, the idea is that this happening, in the future, affects multiple realities, in multiple times. Not only do two Earths and two space stations exploring particle accelerator based power get smushed together, blended or whatnot, but also some other reality, one with kaiju, is leaked into other Earths, in other time periods. That means the monster from the original appeared because of this experiment gone wrong.

Kent's write up way back then.

I should also do a proper rewatch post for Cloverfield.