WARNING: This post will contain a spoiler to the end of Cloverfield Paradox.
Okay, so I, like may others, was blown away when I saw this:
Seeing that monster again after 10 years made me literally scream with excitement.
HOWEVER. Seeing this big guy again has raised A LOT of questions regarding where this movie fits in the Cloverfield timeline. I would like to try and help clear that up now.
So, here's what I thought immediately after watching the film.
Cloverfield (2008) and all of it's ARG and timeline are unchanged. The Monster was from Earth, not space. It is woken up by accident by the company Tagrauto, wrecking an Oil Rig as seen here:
The monster then moves on to New York, scared and looking for its Mother.
These events are in a separate dimension that we do not see in Cloverfield Paradox. It is NOT Jensen's dimension, the one our characters are shifted to at the start of the movie. The Earth we see there is completely different.
The Monster that we see in Cloverfield Paradox is Clover's Mother, the one our monster from the 2008 movie was searching for. (As stated by J.J Abrams in an old interview, Clovie is an infant that is crying out for its Mother, confused and rampaging through New York.) However, the Mother is in a different dimension now, the dimension that our Paradox characters come from. The Mother is RIPPED from the 2008 world and planted into this one. As Mark Stambler mentions at the beginning of the movie in the interview; "they risk tearing open the membrane of space time, smashing together multiple dimensions and not just on that station. Everywhere. This experiment could unleash chaos, the likes of which we've never seen. Monsters, Demons, BEASTS FROM THE SEA."
So, in conclusion, the original 2008 movie, which I will refer to as Dimension 1 goes like this:
Clovie is asleep with his mother at the bottom of the ocean. At some point in time, the Mother is ripped from that Dimension and placed into Dimension 2, Paradox's Earth. Clovie is woken up by Tagrauto in 2008. He is unable to find his mother. Scared and in a frenzy it goes on its rampage, thus creating the events of Cloverfield 1, ending in the creatures death.
Dimension 2. Clover's Mother is yanked into Paradox's Earth from Dimension 1. The Mother, clearly confused and rightfully very pissed, begins to run rampant.
Dimension 3, Jensen's world. This world is simply at war due to the events explained in the movie. Shepard Station is destroyed and the human race falls into utter chaos. There's no monsters there, just World War 3. (I'm sure this is common knowledge and I don't really enjoy explaining the obvious but I just want to be sure everyone is on the same page.)
10 Cloverfield Lane is also a seperate Timeline, having no real connection to these two movies outside of Howard (John Goodman's character in that movie) sharing the same last name as the Author being interviewed at the beginning of the movie, as well as Howard being an employee of Tagruato.
That's the "Timeline" of these movies. To me at least. I may not be correct, but this is what, to me, makes the most sense.