Cloverfield 4
You may have tuned into the new Netflix movie, The Cloverfield Paradox, right away because of the promise that we would learn the origin of the monster from Cloverfield. But did we? Actually, yes we did. If you don’t make things too complicated, then we did indeed get an explanation. It just might not be as “clean” of an explanation as some fans were hoping to see. This post has spoilers through the end of The Cloverfield Paradox. Don’t read on unless you’ve already seen the movie and have seen the twist at the end.
The simplest explanation for how The Cloverfield Paradox ties to the previous Cloverfield movies comes at the very end. When Hamilton’s pod crashed back down on Earth, a giant Cloverfield monster broke through the cloud covers. It is the biggest monster we’ve seen yet. This clearly tied the newest movie to the rest of the franchise.
But how were the monsters created? Mark Stambler (the brother of Howard from 10 Cloverfield Lane) warns in a newscast that the Shepard Accelerator, which is part of the Cloverfield Space Station, might create a huge rip in spacetime. And that’s exactly what happened. When they finally got the accelerator to work, it caused a rip in spacetime and sent the station into a parallel dimension, where they fought for survival. After they were finally able to fix the problems and get back to Earth 1, it was too late. Just as Stambler warned, a rip in spacetime sent monsters and demons in from other dimensions. And these demons ended up not only in different dimensions, but in different timelines — even the past like Stambler had warned.
So that’s the simplest explanation for the origin of the Cloverfield monster. The accelerator from The Cloverfield Project ripped spacetime, pulling the monsters into The Cloverfield Project‘s dimension and Cloverfield‘s dimension. The only difference is that the monsters entered TCP’s “future” world that we see in the movie and they entered into 2008 (or earlier) in Cloverfield‘s world.
You can get a lot more complicated about the whole thing if you want, analyzing for more clues and looking into how that debris that we see falling in Cloverfield fits into all of this. For people interested in going a little more in-depth, check out Heavy’s story here, where we include videos of the space debris and photos of the monster from The Cloverfield Paradox. If you were looking for a simple origin story to help you sleep a little better, then this article can provide that. The monsters came from a spacetime rip created by the accelerator, and were sent into different dimensions and different points in time.
