The newest trailer for Netflix’s surprise release of The Cloverfield Paradox goes all in on the body horror, reminding us how its insane sci-fi premise allows the film to do truly insane and disturbing things to the bodies of its characters.
If you haven’t seen The Cloverfield Paradox yet, what’s your problem, man? Better get a puke bucket if you dive into these spoilers.
The team at Cloverfield space station in Paradox hopes to solve the energy crisis on Earth in 2028 by firing the Shepard particle accelerator, which is 1,000 times the size of other particle accelerators. Instead, the device causes a paradox that rips “open the membrane of space-time, smashing together multiple dimensions, shattering reality.”
The entire station gets immediately transported across the Solar System and into an alternate dimension.
The onboard German scientist, Schmidt, later explains the Paradox another way: “particles interacting with each other across two dimensions … two distinct realities in a multiverse, fighting to occupy the same space, creating chaos.”
That’s why the body horror starts almost immediately, with the first bit happening to one crewmember’s eye:
Because particles in two different dimensions struggle to occupy the same physical space, all sorts of things materialize in bizarre places. For this poor guy, that means he gets a body full of worms and a softball-sized space compass lodged in his abdomen.
This eventually amounts to a somewhat derivative chest-burst scene that totally rips off the original Alien, but in Paradox, the mechanism behind it literally has more dimensions to it — especially when a member of the station’s crew from an alternate dimension materializes inside the actual wall of the ship.
Later, a different wall just sort of consumes the hand of their mechanic, Mundy:
Mundy’s arm then materializes across the ship with a mind of its own, leaving the crew important messages that help them figure out how to survive — at least for a little while. Mundy feels no pain, and the ship’s doctor says it’s almost as if he was born that way. The arm wasn’t ripped off in some blood-soaked sequence. It was simple erased from existence, which is somehow much scarier.
The horribly weird bits of gore only start there, with almost every single person meeting a grisly end in some terribly inventive way.
Have you ever seen somebody flash-frozen when a flooded room gets exposed to the vacuum of space? How about a powerful magnet pulling liquid metal through somebody?
Fracturing reality triggered chaos on the interdimensional scale across all of space and time for these poor folks, and the ensuing horror offers up gore the likes of which we haven’t really seen before.
The Cloverfield Paradox is now streaming on Netflix.
As it turns out, the crazy monster from the first Cloverfield was also probably caused by the Shepard particle accelerator in Paradox.
