3022 Cloverfields

"It's got a vampire AND an explosion!"

- Futurama

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Spoilers for the movies 3022 and The Cloverfield Paradox, though both are weak enough flicks to come pre-spoiled.

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If you were wondering what Omar Epps did after House, 3022 displays his talents fairly enough... and that's about all it does. The rest of the acting isn't bad either (though co-star Kate Walsh normally stars in TV series I'd only watch as part of some Clockwork Orange aversion treatment) but Wikipedia qualifying it as "movies set on space stations" comes across as a tongue-in-cheek assessment of its overall worth. I liked it well enough, but again I'm predisposed toward stories about extinction-level events, as a quick perusal of my pathetic attempts at storytelling will demonstrate. Anyway, in the year 2190 the Earth blows up. No alien motherships, no extra-juicy hurricanes, no extra-flamboyant solar flares; the Earth just spontaneously, inexplicably... blows up. The crew of a refueling station for ships bound for Europa has to deal with being left all alone in the universe, and deals with it badly because space agencies apparently select crews from the most compromised, mentally unstable stock our species produces. Don't expect scientific literacy to shine any brighter in the details, from planets that apparently don't planet to "shockwaves" in space, to smoking cigarettes in a filtered closed atmosphere to what exactly are you refueling ships with and where are they getting their reaction mass and while we're at it doesn't stopping midway to anywhere in frictionless space simply waste momentum, to mission control possessing the only electromagnetic transmission device in existence, to giant glowing computer displays of life support and the crew's health... expressed as percentages. Don't fart or you lose half a point.

But as ridiculous as that all sounds, it's still in a league beyond The Cloverfield Paradox. I actually tolerated the original Cloverfield well enough, and back in 2008 the notion of a first-person, ground-level view of a kaiju invasion came across as a fresh take on an old premise, jittercam abuse aside. Clinging to that conceit, Paradox takes so freshly as to have nothing to do with the original premise. An alternate-reality Earth suffering from energy shortages (but where nobody telecommutes or uses public transport) tasks a space station with creating infinite energy. Needless to say science is evil so the particle accelerator malfunctions and sends the station to an alternate universe, swapping it for the kaiju from the original movie, which is the exactly one connection between them comprising three seconds of air time. (Turns out JJ Abrams tacked that on as an afterthought to a completely unrelated script.) The rest is interpersonal drama between highly trained scientists with less creative or analytical ability than your average post office crew, backed by some TwilightZone-grade science. Where the original accepted kaiju biology as a necessary divergence from physics but otherwise kept the action realistic, here we rapidly depart "science" fiction altogether for the realms of horror movie mysticism. The station-ary object that needs a fancy gyroscope to navigate (to where?) starts phasing random parts of itself between realities and teleporting objects with the directed malice of a poltergeist. Combined with the constant angsting about family members, the brief medical drama and gratuitously contrived spy movie sabotage subplot, one can't help but arrive at the impression of a script cobbled together from every possible genre in the hopes it'll magically make sense somehow. It doesn't. At any point. Did I mention the inexplicably sentient disembodied arm writing prophetic messages? Let's not.

Studios seem to love stories set on small isolated spaceships / space stations. The enclosed environment excuses its own limited scope, variety or props budget, and the small population saves them from hiring extras or bit players. For a bonus, they can abuse the pretext of claustrophobic mental trauma to write characters making idiotic decisions or filling air time arguing with each other, and for a bonus bonus fill more air time with long, wistful takes angsting over their loved ones they left behind... although you should probably have been aware you'd be far away when you jetted off into space. Did noone inform you that space is big?

Still, there's at least a distinction to be made between badly researched, badly plotted SciFi movies which nevertheless show some dedication to their genre (3022) and the baser, more cynically profiteering breed (Cloverfield Paradox) which just slap together fifty cliches and set them on a spaceship because I guess space is weird so anything might happen in space oOOooweeEEEWooo have I suspended your disbelief yet? No? Well obviously we just need more lasers or whatever.