f13.net

Should be popping up on Netflix any minute.

Also congratulations to Philadelphia for beating the most unlikable team in sports.

Aaaaand it's up

This was pretty good. Recommended viewing order is now this, Cloverfield and then 10 Cloverfield.

It was okay, I guess.  Easily the weakest of the three.  The entire premise of the film isn't mentioned at all in either of the other two, which is strange considering it attempts to be a prequel.  It reaks of retconning.  Frankly, I'm disappointed.  They had a real opportunity here and it was utterly squandered.

That cast though.

I haven't dug into the args enough to sufficiently say whether things have been massively retconned.

So sleeping on it, this wasn't a very good movie. Life was better. But it did fill in some of the backstory gaps. Maybe by installment 17 they'll have shoved enough stuff into each movie that we'll get the full story.

Alright alright alright, from /r/cloververse, paraphrasing

Yeah, but why bother?  It was easy to do that anyway and I was going to keep watching them because Cloverfield was decent and 10 Cloverfield Lane was amazing.  Them being in the same universe through retconning doesn't make them any better retroactively.  In fact, the reasoning behind the plot of this movie is so dire that it actually makes them worse.


The more I think about this movie the more I dislike it, so I'm going to stop now while I'm ahead because there is a lot more to complain about.

Movie was meh.

Yeah, my take on it was:

I was ok with it, but in the end, yeah, meh.  The first half was fun, but it broke down with a lot of the issues Ruvaldt already said.  Just a lot of lazy writing and things that didn’t make a whole lot of sense or even seem slightly logical.  Still, had entertainment value, and it does (potentially) establish a nice setup for a whole Cloverfield franchise.

Also, the viral marketing supporting the first film and this film are inconsistent with the movies.

The first and third film were nice spectacle films if you can shut off your brain.  But, that has to be a hard shut off to take it all in...

How so?

I enjoyed this. It wasn't great but it wasn't bad either. The only parts that bothered me were the spacewalk scenes and really only one part of that. The rest of it was fun bits of creepy, funny, and spectacle-driven thrills. I now need to watch Lane because I don't know how they connect at all other than the kid in the bunker.

10 Cloverfield Lane took place on the alternate Earth that was "at war," theoretically. Other than Germany and Russia being Germany and Russia, they left it vague enough to leave "alien attack" as a possible catalyst of said war.

That doesn't really matter though, what matters is that 10 Cloverfield and Cloverfield didn't take place on the same Earth, so they don't need to be connected.

Wait, really?  I don't recall anything in 10 Cloverfield Lane that hinted that there had been a war going on.  Was it on the radio at the beginning or something?

Was worth it for the line "what are you talking about arm?".

Basically yes.  Once I saw Roy from IT Crowd I knew I was going to enjoy myself.

The only thing that connects the Cloverfield movies is that their marketing is more notable than the movies themselves (or as notable at least in the case of 10 Cloverfield Lane which is the only good movie in the bunch). Blair Godzilla was only worth watching in the theater and Sunshine Horizon here burns off any goodwill the franchise might have built up. With another Cloverfield movie (Overlord) supposedly coming out this year one can only wonder what gimmicky marketing trick they're going to come up with next to get people to care.

Cloverfield was a lot of fun to show my kid recently. She had no idea what it was about, so for the first 15 minutes she was bored out of her skull. When the events begin she was legitimately surprised and we had a fun time watching.

We don't get excited about the tricks because we've seen them before, but it's great fun to introduce someone to it.

There is no indication that 10 Cloverfield lane is even remotely connected to the alternative earth visited in Paradox. Paradox presents a 3rd reality, a "trigger" the events of the Cloverfield and 10 Cloverfield lane.

It really showed that this had originally nothing to do with Cloverfield. Still worth the watch (as a Netflix movie) but it's hard to see why Netflix would pay over 50m for this (as is being reported).

This was watchable.

Barely.

It really could have tried harder. 

It Didn't.

It came, it spit something interesting and it went. Its like an hour and a half commercial for a book I'd rather be reading. As far as a connection to Cloverfield.... man if you followed the theories that attempted to link the last two cloverfield movies and expected this one to help tie it together? Oh dear god you'd be mighty pissed right now. JJ Abrams is a hack, and its funny everyone is piling on this movie for "ruining the franchise" for being an inconsistent buggy mess of a narrative the same way he gave star trek the inconsistent buggy mess narrative that got him kicked from all future star trek movies. I wonder what other franchise he fucked sideways,  :awesome_for_real:

I enjoyed Paradox as a creepy horror film but I think the best horror films need some sort of rules or internal logic. This one just said any weird thing you can imagine might happen at any time.

I don't care about spoilers. Anyway, it's not smaller monsters in 10 Cloverfield Lane. It's straight up aliens.

Yeah, they had drones and spaceships, that wasn't monsters.

Again, nothing at all tells me that the three films take place on any shared earths.  Paradox breaking space/time and fucking up an infinite amount of earths is the best way to take this, if they want to continue the 'franchise', as it is.

Your a bit off.
CloverField

Set in 2008, something triggers random monster sleeping in the ocean to wake up and wreck our universe

10 CloverField Lane

In 2016 in Another universe an alien invasion occurs (the aliens may or may not be from the same universe as the cloverfield monster)

CloverField Paradox

In 2028 in ANOTHER universe (we're at 3 different versions of earth now) we activate the particle accelerator and trigger the events of the other two movies. Coincidentally they travel to what I can guess is "our universe" (but lets call it universe 4) where we are in the middle of WW3.

Regarding the first film: There is contradictory information about why the monster is there.  The viral marketing suggests it is an ancient creature awoken by big corporations, while the movie itself shows footage of something falling from the sky in the background in the last 'old' footage they show in the film, suggesting the Cloverfield monster comes from space.

We see four settings across three films.  The secnd film could occur in the same 'prime' universe of the third film, but it seems unlikely to me. 

It was a misdirection, at least the satellite falling to earth and awakening the monster. Before Paradox previous fan theory is that the slushy corporation was mining "A" creature that was alien in origin to be used added ingredients for a new brand of pepsi and the constant mining for its blood and skin cells actually woke it up. With Paradox, I think we now can assume that the satellite seen falling down was destroyed during the events of Paradox.

As the Satellite in Paradox's successful particle accelerator test literally merged "all" instances of said satellite that occupied that same space without regard to time, and considering we launch these projects several years in advance i can see the satellite in Cloverfield 2008 getting wrecked due to Paradox's satellite occupying the same
space during the test. .

You guys are overthinking it. It's all a bunch of stuff that's stitched together, with the 2nd two movies being made from scripts that weren't written with any connection to Cloverfield in mind. In both cases it sounds like they're were made into Cloverfield films while the movies were already in production. As for the original, I doubt there is any sort of "official" answer for the creature's origins. That ARG shit is all just marketing. Trying to piece it all together is like trying to make a timeline of the Terminator franchise.

Here you go. (http://terminator.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline)

--Dave

I wish I could edit that page just to put "psycho" at the very end of it.

The funny part is that we're not even putting any effort into this. I just like multiverse theory so I instantly understood what their trying to do, and now laughing at all the attempts to go back to linear storytelling as JJ Abrams just gobbles and shits out more interesting premises into half backed movies tied very very lousily to his addle brains idea of canon.

This Animaniacs bit from '95 seems ever so apropos here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOtmdHiCJNY (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOtmdHiCJNY)

Really not sure why though  :awesome_for_real:

(and yes, I've been around here long enough to know this is where things usually go after only a short while, but sometimes it gets a smidge egregious)

It doesn't require thinking because they explain it. They literally shoved a bad YouTube video into the movie to explain the entire thing.

The only video I want to see is when Abrams told the director after he had started filming the movie that this is now a Cloverfield movie and has to tie all the movies together somehow.

Terminator Genisys was a good, fun movie. That is all.

That was literally that youtube video. This wasn't meant to "tie" these movies together but give JJ Abrams an excuse to call everything cloverfield

So much no.

It's actually kinda like a JJ Abrams movie also. Like Star Trek (2009) it wants to reboot the franchise while also acknowledging everything that happened before, and like Star Trek Into Darkness a lot of it is call backs to the better movies that just leave you wanting to watch those other movies instead.

Cloverfield: J.J. Abrams' Godzilla.
Star Trek reboot: J.J. Abrams' Gene Roddenberry's Star trek, 'nuff said.
10 Cloverfield Lane: J.J. Abrams' H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds (Twist by M. Night Shamalamadingdong)
The Cloverfield Paradox: J.J. Abrams' Event Horizon (Guest ending by J.J. Abrams' Stephen King's The Mist).

He's like Midas but he turns everything he touches into a Fast and the Furious movie.

And boy do I love fast and the furious

Likewise.

Also, 10 Cloverfield Lane is absolutely not War of the Worlds.  Reducing that movie down to just its last eight minutes is silly.

10 Cloverfield Lane: JJ Abrams' John Carpenters The Thing then?

Eh, it was ok. I liked the setting and idea of it, the acting was decent though everyone was as shallow as a wading pool, which kinda sucked. Too shallow for a good drama, too static for good action, not enough tension for a thriller, just kinda tried several things and sucked at all of them.

But the ending was atrocious, if they lop the last 30 seconds or whatever off the movie it would improve immensely. There was no need for that and it was just silly.

I finally watched 10 Cloverfield Lane this weekend, and that is clearly the best film of the three. Best written and acted, most tightly scripted. However, it's pretty clear the only real thing linking the three movies together is all meta. It's a marketing gimmick more than a cohesive universe, although Paradox's Youtube video certainly does enough to allow for the possibility of the three being linked in a cohesive universe. I don't really care, I enjoyed all three as separate films anyway.

This was awful, contrived and unnecessary.  It was Event Horizon reworked as a Final Destination movie.  The way the 'random instability' seemed to only arise as the plot needed to get rid of people made me angry, I could never get into the movie enough to just enjoy the spectacle.  Not to mention the stupidity of the decoupling scene that of course required the requisite heroic sacrifice.  Utter garbage.

I would have been far happier if Cloverfield was left as some vaguely connected way of telling apocalyptic stories with no real need to explain the cause.

It would have worked better as a marketing gimmick - Hi! This bunch is making a horror/monster movie, so they are working "Cloverfield" into the title to let you know its one of their movies! There is no reason to connect them otherwise, and no-one ever really felt any need to connect the first and second Cloverfield movies at all.

You don't say.  :awesome_for_real:
I just watched the redletter media video about this movie and apparently 10 "Cloverfield" lane and "Cloverfield Paradox" had nothing to do with the Cloverfield "universe" during writing or shooting. Anything connecting it to the original Cloverfield movie was either done in post or in reshoots.

And for the record, this movie was terrible. Way way worse than Bright. But the writing was better.  :why_so_serious:

JJ Abrams is the diet coke of movies.

JJ Abrams is a poor man's hobo.

I rarely do this, since I'd rather talk about what I enjoy than what I don't, but I really wish I could have my hour and forty-two minutes back. That was really, really bad, IMHO.

And note that I am fine with Abrams. He's got good projects and disappointments, just like most producers not named Uwe Boll. I also enjoyed the hell out of Cloverfield and 10 Cloverfield Lane. The latter might not have started life as a "Cloverfield" movie, but the tone fit, and it was well done in any case.

Paradox was just a train wreck. I'd rather have rewatched Spectral. Or an Adam Sandler marathon. Maybe even Pluto Nash.

How's Spectral ? Netflix insists that I watch it.

Ehhhhhhhhhhhh. It's fine. 80's B-movie sci-fi plot with some pretty nice modern cheap special effects. Popcorn flick.

It was a great idea ruined by all the things that ruin great ideas. The movie cost something like 80 million to make, and and it should have cost 8.

It's just executed very badly. Watching it you can see how a different director/actor combination might have made a really good movie, so it kinda hurts to watch the money burning on screen.