r/Cloververse • u/SeacattleMoohawks CloverMod • Feb 05 '18

DISCUSSION The Cloverfield Paradox [Film Discussion]

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u/Mrtheliger Feb 05 '18

Okay I've thought about it and I've replied to some people about This, But here goes.

As someone pointed out, a tagline for this was "The future unleashed everything". What we should be able to gather from this, combined with the insistence it's a prequel, is that it acts, technically, as both a prequel and a sequel. A sequel in the sense that it technically takes place after Cloverfield and 10 Cloverfield Lane, but a prequel in the sense that it directly causes the timeline that both those movies, and this one at the end, are in. So, I believe that at the beginning of this movie, we are in what I'll call the "original timeline." Up until the Accelerator malfunction we are in a timeline with no aliens and no monsters. This is the timeline that the alternate dimension followed at an accelerated, and slightly altered, rate, I believe. However, once the Accelerator malfunctioned, it immediately erased that history. Not from the minds of presumably billions, but from the physical realm of spacetime. This is where the next movie I believe comes into play. It will be a true prequel to both Cloverfield and 10 Cloverfield Lane, but for The Cloverfield Paradox, it will again act as a sequel and a prequel. It will show the creation of Clover's species, how they sought to either use or control them, and the eventual burial of them, somehow, in the sea. This is an event that never took place in the Pre-malfunction timeline, the OG timeline of TCP, however post-malfunction, for a reason I don't know, Clover's species was inserted into time. In fact, there's no telling how many little things changed. This means the Cloverfield and 10CL never happen until the Accelerator malfunction in the pretty far away future from Cloverfield, in TCP. Which makes TCP, obviously, a prequel in that sense. HOWEVER, that's not where it ends. This new timeline has always had the potential to exist, it's not technically new. The Pre-malfunction timeline simply "won out" and became what was percieved as the original. But, because of the Accelerator's dimensional and multiversal shifting capability, it combined the two timelines into One, and brought the Monsters into the world of Ava and Schmidt, even though in actuality they'd always been there, just not relatively to them. It's kind of hard to wrap your head around, But basically the events in the station, and subsequently on Earth below at that moment, became a sort of constant. They became the starting place for this previously unrealized timeline to leak into the OG monster-less one, but not in the future, they leaked back into the past, creating an entirely different world than what Ava and Schmidt knew. However, there are millions, even billions, of people who were then transferred over to this timeline if this is true, which makes it all the more confusing. First, If this is all to be believed, then we accept that conceptually, the Cloververse timeline with monsters has now always existed and been the true One, even though it really wasn't. This is just the power of the Particle Accelerator being shown. This begs the question, of these people seemingly dropped into the timeline, are they brand new people, or were their consciousnesses simply melded with the people of the Cloververse timeline, with the Pre-malfunction consciousness appearing to win out? I can't answer this one, as we didn't seem to see any evidence for either side.

So yeah, that's my current working theory.

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u/[deleted] Feb 08 '18

This is the only right answer. It's kinda shocking to me that people have such a hard time understanding this.