@jorgito2001 said:

Are we to believe the Paradox just caused a crazy rift in the space/time continuum?

I think that is the general ideal. Donal Logue's conspiracy theorist character who wrote the book on "The Cloverfield Paradox" in the movie said that the particle accelerator could disrupt events in the past. The first movie was set in 2008 when New York was represented as being just like our world until the monsters came. This movie was set in 2028 in a world full of famine and an energy crisis that is on the brink of war. It is definitely not set up as a direct prequel to the first movie. A lot of the negative reactions online seem to stem from the fact that the trailer misled people by stating, "10 years ago, some thing arrived. Now find out why."

That's only vaguely accurate after taking into account that this movie franchise now deals with the idea of multiple dimensions that aren't directly tied to one another. But that's the only logical explanation that I've seen after people have seen this movie. The conspiracy theorist seemed to be right about the work on the space station affecting the past in both their own dimension as well as other dimensions. The Earth in Paradox doesn't appear to be the same as the one in the other two movies. On the Earth that Paradox's characters come from, the giant aliens/monsters just appeared in 2028. In the first movie, they appeared sometime in 2008. In 10 Cloverfield Lane, the attack happened in 2014 or 2015 (Michelle's vehicle inspection expired 07/15). There was no sign of worldwide famine or an energy crisis in either of the first two films.

What we see falling into the ocean in Cloverfield is not the capsule. What we see is a satellite that belonged to Tagruato company that fell out of orbit and into the ocean ( believe it falls because of the rift). The rift the Shepard created caused all dimensions and all of time to inhabit the same point at the same time. This caused the original Cloverfield monster to get pulled from its dimension and into the dimension where Cloverfield takes place, but that took place thousands of years in the past so its been sleeping since it was pulled from its dimension. Fast forward to 2008 and the satellite crashing into the ocean somehow causes the Cloverfield monster to wake up. However that monster was a juvenile, so being unable to find its mother it freaks out and, well, you can see the aftermath in the movie. The monster we see in Cloverfield is shorter than the buildings in New York, so it can't be the monster we see at the end of Cloverfield Paradox. What we probably see in Cloverfield Paradox is mama. Se we get an idea as the size of a full size Cloverfield monster (wish someone would come up with a name for the species).