The Cloverfield Paradox Reviews Roundup: What Are Critics Saying?

It came as a massive surprise in the middle of the Super Bowl. The first trailer for a brand new Cloverfield movie played during a commercial break early in the Super Bowl, only for the movie to drop on Netflix as soon as the game came to an end.

The Cloverfield Paradox is the third entry in the franchise, following Cloverfield and 10 Cloverfield Lane, and attempts to answer some of the questions about how the original monster movie happened. As it turns out, though, the results are a bit of a mixed bag. The reviews are a bit less mixed. While there are a few critics that seemed to legitimately enjoy the movie, regardless of its flaws, the vast majority of those that took in the movie after the big game seem to view it as a miss.

With an average score of 40 on GameSpot sister site Metacritic, The Cloverfield Paradox is tracking far lower than both Cloverfield (64) and 10 Cloverfield Lane (76). Take a look at a sampling of reviews below to get an idea of the movie's critical reception.

• Movie: The Cloverfield Paradox
• Studio: Paramount and Netflix
• Where you can watch: Netflix
• Release: February 5

GameSpot

"The Cloverfield Paradox starts out riffing on the early structure of movies like Alien and The Thing, with some cursory efforts to establish personalities and relationships for its half dozen or so characters. They're all basically interchangeable by the end, and you'll be hard pressed to remember most of their names by the time the credits roll." -- Michael Rougeau [Full review]

IGN

"Some of the more absurd moments would play better if the film never left Paradox's space station. 10 Cloverfield Lane maintained tension by not leaving its core setting, but Paradox occasionally heads back to Earth. There, the world is under siege by something that will look quite familiar to Cloverfield fans. These scenes, told from the point of view of one of the space station member's significant others, distract more than add to the story. They feel included to offer winks and nods to Cloverfield fans but not to tell a compelling, concurrent story." -- Jonathon Dornbush [Full review]

Nerdist

"At its best, The Cloverfield Paradox is a fantastically tense locked room mystery in space, playing off complex concepts like quantum entanglement theory. In its weaker moments, it's a solid sci-fi that leans heavily into the giants who've walked before it, whether it's the suspicion and paranoia of The Thing or the brutal industrial body horror of Tetsuo the Iron Man. The film's true strength comes from its vision and incredibly strong cast." -- Rosie Knight [Full review]

Collider

"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. It's a movie that's not particularly scary, interesting, or deep, but it does have good actors performing admirably." -- Matt Goldberg [Full review]

The Hollywood Reporter

"A trainwreck of a sci-fi flick bent on extending a franchise that should have died a peaceful death almost exactly one decade ago, Julius Onah's The Cloverfield Paradox follows the lead of the far-superior 10 Cloverfield Lane in imagining a Cloverfield spinoff whose genre ingredients have little to do with the original found-footage, giant-monster flick." -- John DeFore [Full review]

Paste Magazine

"[When] The Cloverfield Paradox is firing on all cylinders, especially in its second act, it's not quite like anything else I've ever seen. Gory and harrowing, but simultaneously propped up by a streak of deadpan gallows humor (especially from Chris O'Dowd), it revels in its freedom to do whatever it wants without ever stopping to consider the need for an explanation." -- Jim Vorel [Full review]

Slashfilm

"There's something to be celebrated here: keeping The Cloverfield Paradox top-secret and making it suddenly available on Netflix is a way to ensure that everyone has a chance to view the film on the same level playing field. There's no early buzz, no early hype, no early negative word. Everyone goes in fresh. That's the positive way of looking at things. 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." -- Chris Evangelista [Full review]