Streaming on Netflix after a surprise Super Bowl Sunday teaser, “The Cloverfield Paradox” is “Lost” in space — a faint, well-acted blip on the radar of your viewing life.
It’s the third in a franchise begun a decade ago with the found-footage exercise “Cloverfield.” Efficient, streamlined and happily fatalistic, that unpretentious winner depicted a rough night in New York City as some of its more forgettable millennials coped, badly, with a largely off-screen sea monster. The series continued in 2016 with “10 Cloverfield Lane,” an effectively claustrophobic underground-bunker affair, narratively tied to the first “Cloverfield” but only barely, with used dental floss and a little masking tape.
Sunday’s Super Bowl teaser for “The Cloverfield Paradox” promised an answer to the first movie’s obliquely stated question: How did these monsters come to pass? The pre-credits sequence in director Julius Onah’s Netflix feature, written by Oren Uziel and Doug Jung, fills us in on the state of Earth in the near future. “The world’s energy resources will be fully exhausted in five years,” a newscaster intones, though he could be speaking for Netflix’s commitment to original programming if the network settles for so-so products on the order of “The Cloverfield Paradox.”
On the Cloverfield space station, an international crew of scientists, astronauts and teeth-gritters face a dilemma. Unless the insanely powerful particle accelerator succeeds in generating energy for the planet (details unimportant, and withheld), Earth will collapse into chaos, global warfare and Adam Sandler Netflix Originals.