Alcohollywood Podcast: Ep. 327 – The Cloverfield Paradox (328)

Jared’s been zapped into another dimension, so Jon Espino of The Young Folks and HollywoodChicago.com joins Clint to investigate the mysteries of Netflix’s Super Bowl-marketed sci-fi disaster The Cloverfield Paradox!

A previously-unrelated sci-fi thriller given the J.J. Abrams treatment, The Cloverfield Paradox turns Julius Onah’s The God Particle into a confusing, meandering installment of Paramount’s favorite clearinghouse for original sci-fi movies!

Here, the crew of the Cloverfield Station (Daniel Bruhl, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, John Ortiz, Chris O’Down, David Oyelowo, Ziyi Zhang, Aksel Hennie) run a Large Hadron Collider in space to solve the world’s energy crisis. Once they fire it up, though, they find themselves in another reality with the Earth gone, a mysterious visitor (Elizabeth Debicki) stuck in the wall, and all kinds of crazy dimension-warping shenanigans. 

That sounds really cool, right? Unfortunately, it becomes a boring slog of flat characters, confusing technobabble and some arbitrary connections to the rest of the otherwise-solid Cloverfield universe. Still, Clint and Jon soldier on for your pleasure – listen and check out our custom cocktail and drinking game!

(Thanks to our sponsor Overcast as part of the Chicago Podcast Coop!)

THIS EPISODE'S DRINK:

DRINKING RULES FOR THE CLOVERFIELD PARADOX:

  1. Any time you see or hear something that’s obviously a reshoot to make the movie more Cloverfield-y (mentions of Cloverfield, Slusho, Kelvin)
  2. Every time Chris O’Dowd’s character cracks wise
  3. Whenever the characters mention, once again, that starvation/war is inevitable

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Tam (Ziyi Zhang) says in Mandarin, “Logic doesn’t apply to any of this.”

NEXT EPISODE: 

We help Steven Seagal fight his greatest enemy yet – pollution! – with On Deadly Ground.

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About Alcohollywood Staff

The film staff of the film website/podcast Alcohollywood.

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