Professor Popinjay's Compendium of Perspicacity

A Non-review by Professor Popinjay

Wellllllllllllllllll poop.

Oh SPOILERS BTW. LIKE MAJOR SPOILERS.

Wellllllllllllllllll poop.

They went and done a PotC:aWE on us! They get us excited for a nice little movie franchise and then just throw it into a blender.

I was riveted throughout this film. I was at the World’s Edge of my seat! I wanted to know what was going to happen and why throughout the whole movie. All this crazy crap was happening. People who no one recognized were appearing inside the spaceship walls. Chris O’Dowd’s arm randomly falls off. The Russian guy inexplicably has the ship’s gyroscope inside him. Weirdness! Why was all this happening!?! The answer? Science fiction!

These people in a space station keep trying to ignite this reactor thing and when they finally make it work for a second, it converges dimensions/opens a portal/summons a kaiju/aliens/makes a bunch of other weird stuff happen/et cetera. Lame. Cop out.

I wanted a plot. I wanted a villain. Okay the lady from the other dimension the team found in their wall, she knew of villains. She knew of plots. But her suspicions of this universe’s versions of those same people were unfounded and not true. The only thing close to an antagonist we get in this dimension is Volkov and other than some brief arguments, no one suspects him of any foul play until he’s dead! He’s inexplicably full of the ship’s experimental worms AND the ship’s gyroscope gizmo which the team learns about from Chris O’Dowd’s alternate universe arm. So why is alternate universe wall lady wrong about everything but alternate universe severed arm on the money about Volkov unwittingly storing a rather large piece of equipment in his person? It makes zero sense. It’s just a bunch of crazy sci-fi gobbledygook with no real explanation and then it’s over.

And yeah there is a plot about main character’s children being alive in the alternate universe and she tries to save them from some impending doom what befell them back in her own universe. It’s very Scarlet Witch had Scarlet Witch been content to save her kids with a video message. Meh.

Unless J.J. Abram’s puts out a fourth Cloverfield movie that explains everything that went on in that other universe (à la “Noises Off” with its backstage hilarity going on while the same characters concordantly present an equally farcical play in the foreground) thus giving explanation to literally every bizarre occurrence in this universe including the kaiju and the alien invasion, I will remain quite disappointed with this franchise. Thankfully I have a wonderful wife and five beautiful children to love and care for so life will go on.

J.J. Abrams is basically finding unrelated scripts and attempting to connect them. That’s still a cool concept even when only vaguely tacking on those connections. But it needs to wrap it up with some all encompassing explanation and plot instead of just saying it was SCIENCE!

The rumor mill regarding a fourth film is just that. Rumors. In the midst of it is the sale of Paramount, the writer’s strike, and a multitude of other projects with which the main contenders in these films are involved. Hopefully the project doesn’t get back-burnered indefinitely. Will we see a resolution to all these weird issues or will we end up with more questions than we had before? This is why I generally avoid critiquing a work in progress. It’s all speculation and speculation is a waste of time in my book.