The Cloverfield Paradox is an unusual movie.

A whopping 45 million dollars was spent on it, yet Netflix only advertised it once during the Super Bowl. The movie was released on Netflix shortly after. From there, everything went downhill. Only 5 million people watched it in the first week that it was released, and its current Rotten Tomatoes rating is a devastating seventeen percent.

For those who don’t know, The Cloverfield Paradox is one of the movies made by the Cloverfield franchise. The Cloverfield franchise has produced a collection of movies which not only includes the aforementioned, but also Cloverfield and 10 Cloverfield Lane (rated 77% and 90% on Rotten Tomatoes respectively). All of the movies occur in the same universe and involve monsters attacking Earth.

The most poetic way to describe the film is as ‘gorgeous chaos’. A less poetic and more honest way would be ‘plotless chaos’. It could have been a great movie; the set was gorgeous, the actors were talented, and the cast was very diverse, which is always a plus when it comes to any science fiction media, but the plot of a movie is its meat, and The Cloverfield Paradox’s plot was decayed, 25-year-old chicken that belonged in the trash. None of the events in it are vaguely connected, and the only explanation that the audience gets for them is a scientific paradox.

Science fiction is supposed to be a bit outlandish; that’s the point of the genre, but it still has to remain suspended in reality in some way, something The Cloverfield Paradox fails to accomplish. Perhaps the true paradox in The Cloverfield Paradox is the fact that directors can spend 45 million dollars on a production and come up with this.