What Scaredy-Cats Need To Know Before They See Netflix's 'The Cloverfield Paradox'

Spoilers ahead. Everyone watching the Super Bowl on Sunday got the surprise of a lifetime, and it wasn't the Patriots' loss. During the football championship, a trailer for the newest Cloverfield movie dropped, and it announced that the film, The Cloverfield Paradox, was hitting Netflix that night. Before jumping right in, you'll need to know just how scary The Cloverfield Paradox is. It's a totally natural question to have, considering that Cloverfield and 10 Cloverfield Lane had enough terrifying twists to scare anyone's pants off.

The Super Bowl commercial certainly made the latest J.J. Abrams installment seem frightening, as it showed actor Gugu Mbatha-Raw, the star of the movie, leaving a hurried and emotional video message. She didn't quite say "Welcome to your tape," but she seemed distressed as she broke the fourth wall, saying, "Whatever you're doing right now, stop. Go to your children, right now." The trailer then cut to a bunch of scary-looking scenes flashing before your eyes of people screaming in terror as they're trapped or phsyically falling apart.

The real movie is in fact scary, but it's definitely manageable because the whole thing moves slowly overall. It's not like the trailer, in which everything flashes in intense succession. Rather, the film has a handful of majorly freaky moments, like a character becoming possessed and throwing up a bunch of space-worms (yes, really).

The great thing about The Cloverfield Paradox is that it (probably) takes place in the same world as the other Cloverfield movies, which all rely on similar dystopian alien invasions of some sort for their fear factors. In this new addition to the series, which was produced by Abrams, most of the characters are in space on a mission to power-up a giant energy source called Shepard. Mbatha-Raw's character, Hamilton, goes on the mission in an attempt to, along with the other scientists on board, save the earth from an energy crisis. Hamilton's husband, Michael (played by Roger Davies) remains on earth, and throughout the movie, he is shown dealing with the crisis happening on earth: power blackouts and war.

At the very end of the movie, when Hamilton and the only other survivor from the spacecraft return to Earth on a pod, a giant monster shoots up above the cloud. It will probably make you nostalgic for Cloverfield, the original movie from the apocalyptic series. Even though that last moment in the film is largely the only similarity to the 2008 movie that started it all — and scared everyone just with its commercials — it still has plenty of terrifying twists and turns to have you on edge.

When the team that went out on the mission to space ends up in another dimension, things go awry. The space shuttle basically becomes a haunted house situation, as the navigational gyroscope goes missing and they become lost at space. From there, things only get weirder, as the crew finds a woman tangled up in the wires in the walls. It turns out that this woman, Mina Jensen (Elizabeth Debicki) is from an alternate universe, and while she stays on the ship, the crew's members start mysteriously dying.

At points it seems like aliens have invaded the ship, due to the strange emergence of tentacles, but most of the deaths are due to errors in the crew's attempts to get the ship back to their own universe so they can return to Earth. With everything going wrong both in space and on Earth, the movie will make you pretty jumpy at times. The Cloverfield Paradox is undoubtedly different from the first two films, but it still delivers on the suspense front.