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Reviews
The Cloverfield Paradox (2018)
IMDB ranks them correctly
Having seen 10 Cloverfield Lane and Cloverfield prior to watching The Cloverfield Paradox, I agree with IMDB in ranking them in the same order. And the rating gap between the first two and The Cloverfield Paradox is well-deserved, although it should be larger.
There are considerable differences between the first two parts in the series, but they are both very enjoyable in their own way. If you ignore the expensive actors and the ending, 10 Cloverfield Lane was done using fairly simple means, left so much more to our imagination, and yet worked remarkably well. Cloverfield took place much closer to the threat and had more action and special effects, which also worked well for me.
Both emphasize realism. They feel very credible. From the start, The Cloverfield Paradox takes a very different, very Hollywoodesque stance instead. It begins as a typical American space mission film. We build a hero narrative - a hero is needed to save Earth - do the typical family separation, sadness and hope thing, and then move on to a typical space mission setup and execution. More special effects and a lot of permanent epic background music.
That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I found that the film ends up working with these off-the-shelf elements while failing to deliver a credible or even interesting plot. At some point (the "arm" scene) the film completely dropped the ball for me and it was clear that it wouldn't recover. It continued with many rather ridiculous leaps of logic and failed to engage me.
If you liked the other two Cloverfield films, you'll probably have to watch this just to have done it and make up your own opinion, but it's nothing like them and you don't miss out on anything if you skip this.
Afflicted (2013)
Best found footage yet
This is by far the best found footage style film I've seen, and one of the best horror films in general as well. It not only serves to make the best of the low budget, but works really well in transporting the impression that we're closer to the characters and more involved with the problems they're facing. There are also many scenes where the camera work doesn't really add anything, but in any case it was never a distraction or annoying for me.
There were quite a few special effects that come across as surprisingly convincing. It is well-acted, overall well-paced, develops in interesting ways with well-chosen locations, and has few scenes that seemed out of place. The plot is fairly simple, but it works, and has a few twists and thought-provoking elements. There were only a few scenes that were really scary, but this didn't take anything away for me in terms of entertainment value.
Given its low budget and independent nature, what Afflicted delivered is even more amazing, but it stands tall without any kind of independence bonus. I'm taking 1 star off for the slow-paced beginning.
Radius (2017)
A short story with a lot of filler material
This film felt like something that should have been at best a short story, but was stretched into a long-winded, uninspired feature film that doesn't go anywhere. The basic idea sounds interesting enough to make you watch it, and the first minutes are fine as well, but it's only downhill from there.
One of the first negative observations for me was that the plot, as well as many of the characters' actions, are really kind of ridiculous from the beginning. That wouldn't be so bad in itself, but the story also drags on for a long while without anything significant happening in terms of understanding what's going on and why.
It gets worse when, at some point, the film takes a fairly long break to explore some seemingly off-topic backstory that has hardly anything to do with what has happened so far. The remainder proceeds in the same style, felt out of place, and contained various additional filler scenes that seemed to serve no useful purpose.
3 stars for an idea with some originality and a solid beginning that, however, was later ruined by poorly constructed developments and a lot of filler material.
Uncanny (2015)
Not bad, but far below Ex Machina
The best way for me to judge this film is to compare it with Ex Machina, since I watched that one earlier and it has a very similar basic plot. Overall, Uncanny felt like a much cheaper and weaker (in every way) variant of the Ex Machina theme.
Everything in Ex Machina had much more depth and attention to detail. The story was more complex, developed at just the right pace, and involved various fascinating twists and turns, and the characters and acting seemed more interesting and convincing to me. I don't even recall seeing any special effects in Uncanny, but there were a few in Ex Machina that worked very well. There was more attention to detail in everything, even down to the design of the tech lab in which the whole thing took place.
I didn't bother to compare the budgets, and I grant that Uncanny probably had to work with much less. Kudos to them for still delivering a watchable, sufficiently entertaining movie. But in absolute terms, if you haven't seen it, go watch Ex Machina first. That one is close to perfect, 8 or 9, so I'm rating Uncanny far below that at 5.
Contagion (2011)
Too dry
I put on this film knowing full well that I shouldn't expect many thrills from this "thriller". since the subject matter of pandemic diseases is a fairly dry one if you approach it from the perspective of health organizations and other public administrative organs - as Contagion does to a large extent. While this isn't for everyone, I expected fine entertainment regardless, since I'm generally interested in historical pandemics, studied some of them in detail, and also enjoyed learning about the public responses.
As it turned out, the tone set by Contagion was much less engaging than I expected. This film does indeed spend most of its time showing health organization workers analyzing the outbreak, tracing contacts, developing a vaccine, finding suitable public policies, etc. - but they end up transporting a sober, factual, even statistical view of the outbreak. Death tolls are updated a few times, but we're only given numbers, and no attempt is made to show or explain what it really means. I generally felt no real sense of urgency in what they said or did. Trivially, even the mortality rate of the virus of 25% or so is of course fairly huge in a historical context, but hardly a certain death sentence. It wouldn't even have required artistic license to make the disease more similar to Ebola and get closer to a 90% mortality that way.
The second view in this film is from the perspective of the perished patient zero's family, and brings us closer to the ground, but there weren't any thrills or any sense of urgency to be had here for me either. There are hints of a breakdown of civilization, but this idea isn't pursued in any detail and seems to go away before it gets too bad. Putting more emphasis on this could have helped a lot. Similarly, the characters take a rather casual stance on the risks, when there would have been great potential to explore the psychological response to a growing threat that starts out far away, and gets closer and closer until it becomes an immediate threat, and then deep-rooted paranoia, fear and escape plans take over. I guess they shouldn't have depicted patient zero's family for any of this to work.
Overall, Contagion takes a fairly sober view on the outbreak and failed to really engage me. Perhaps it tried to explore too many different views without going into any detail, and perhaps the health organization and administration stuff should have taken a backseat to on-the-ground action. It's watchable (and I finished it), so maybe it should be 5 stars, but there are really so many things that didn't work well and nothing stands out positively for me, so I'm giving 4.