Saturday, March 6, 2021

'Chaos Walking' Takes a Wild Sci-Fi Premise And Does Absolutely Nothing With It

 

Chaos Walking is a movie that has all the makings of a disaster. Lionsgate originally bought the rights to Patrick Ness' YA novels in 2011, when adaptations of YA novels were all the range. At one point, Charlie Kaufman wrote a draft of the screenplay. Daisy Ridley was cast in 2016, hot off The Force Awakens. Filming with director Doug Liman started in 2017—four whole years ago—and then there were extensive reshoots. It finally crawls its way to theaters in the middle of a global pandemic, and all signs point to this film being a mess. Instead, it's just really boring, taking its weird-as-hell concept and doing very little with it.

About that concept: Chaos Walking takes place on an alien planet colonized by humans where all of men's thoughts are visible and vocal in what is called the Noise. Tom Holland plays Todd, the youngest member of an all-male community led by a man with a sinister edge known as the Mayor (Mads Mikkelsen). There are no women around, just a bunch of dudes, including Nick Jonas, who plays the Mayor's son. All members of the female gender were apparently murdered in a battle with the planet's native species. So when a shuttle of explorers crash lands and the only survivor is a girl named Viola (Daisy Ridley), let's just say that minds are blown in a quite literal way. Viola immediately becomes a target of the Mayor, and she is forced to team up with Todd to find a way to get word out to her home ship and warn of a planned attack.

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The biggest challenge Chaos Walking is forced to overcome is how bizarre it is to represent thoughts visually. Liman and company settled on a sort of flimsy aura orbiting the heads of the guys, accompanied by cloying voiceover. Unfortunately, it just looks and sounds goofy. As Todd tries to "control his Noise," he repeats words and phrases in a staccato. It's not very deep or illuminating. The effect makes Todd seem like a human version of the dog Dug from Pixar's Up. Instead of verbalizing his constant desire for a squirrel like that aforementioned canine, Todd just repeats "girl" a lot. Speaking of dogs, I want to issue a warning: There's a very cute one in this movie and something very bad happens to it. Given that everything else on screen is pretty tame, it was shocking and unappreciated.

The themes buried in Chaos Walking remain underground; the final product shows little interest in delving into them. Despite the fact that the plot explicitly deals with misogyny, any exploration of that is watered down. The thoughts of hoards of men who have just encountered a woman for the first time in years are shockingly not disgusting, and Todd's immediate romantic interest in Viola is presented as a cutesy quirk—he just wants to kiss her!—instead of being actually invasive. (Presumably no trace of Kaufman's draft exists on screen, but he actually tackles some of these topics in the much better I'm Thinking of Ending Things.)

Chaos Walking's aesthetic is Hunger Games-adjacent—Lionsgate also produced that franchise—without any of the zaniness. The only truly inspired piece of costuming is the giant fur pelt Mikkelsen rocks at all times. There's a world in which this coat is emblematic of a kind of insane, destined to become a cult favorite energy, but instead it's just indicative of all the missed opportunities. In another world, Chaos Walking has Jupiter Ascending potential, wherein it's weird enough to be fascinating. Alas, it's just a snooze.

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