Chaos Walking

Mar 11

Ironically, based on the novel “The Knife of Never Letting Go” by Patrick Ness, Chaos Walking was announced in 2011 with the expectation that it would be the next YA-adapted bonanza like the “Hunger Games” to follow the Twilight series. But the project immediately ran into problems as the script went through numerous rewrites. Doug Liman of “The Bourne Identity” was brought on to direct and the project was to cast with rising young Hollywood stars Tom Holland (Marvel’s Spiderman) as the protagonist and Daisy Ridley (Rey of Star Wars) as the only woman on a dystopian world where men’s thoughts are verbalized aloud and are visible in a misty cloud that circles their heads.

The film was shot in 2017 and was scheduled to be released in spring 2019. After audience testing proved troublesome, the project went back for extensive reshoots in 2019 and was rescheduled to be released in 2021.

The result of all this work was (dare I say it) chaos. Liman’s direction is all over the map in a troubled film that not only feels like a patchwork quilt of ideas but fails to deliver on every level. The plot is a mess, and the unmotivated characters are limp and lifeless. Even the always charismatic Tom Holland struggles to deliver a believable performance of the painfully cliched and wooden script by novel author Patrick Ness and Christopher Ford (Spiderman: Homecoming).

The story of a human settlement on an alien planet is set inexplicably in a Gold Rush-era frontier town with almost no trace of the space-traveling technology that got them there. Instead, we are left with space settlers who somehow have developed southern dialects to match their thermal longs-johns and 49er hats. The thoughts of the male characters (which is mostly everyone) swirl around their heads constantly creating a cacophony of chatter and images that are not only difficult to follow as many people are doing it at once, but the effect upstages any chance the actors may have of creating a character of interest that the audience can pay any attention to at all. The verbalized thoughts are similar in style to having someone walking around behind the actors with a script in his hands telling you everything that the character is thinking and doing while he does it. The process is not only redundant and tedious, but it slows the pace of the story down to a crawl.

Tom Holland’s character, Todd Hewitt, was originally written to be thirteen-years-old and although Holland may have been roughly that age when the script was started back in 2011, he clearly isn’t now. The effect is a man-boy character who bounces back and forth between a lost boy and a young man never really landing on either one.

Mads Mikkelson (Dr. Strange) plays the sinister mayor of the settlement in all its one-dimensional glory. The script doesn’t bother to convey what motivates Mikkleson’s character till nearly the end of the film leaving the audience unsure why he is doing all the evil things he does along the way. David Oyelowo (The Butler, Selma) plays a demonic minister who literally shoots fire and brimstone with his thoughts as he mutters incoherent religious babble and commits every evil atrocity imaginable for no other reason than to reaffirm how truly hateful and spiteful ministers in our community truly are…I suppose. His character is incomprehensible and frankly, a lazy attempt to criticize the faith community. In addition, Nick Jonas shows up as the mayor’s beleaguered son, who makes one attempt to get affection from his father and is rejected. His character serves no other function in the story therefore Jonas just stands around in the back of crowds for largely 99% of the film. Another excellent use of the 100 million dollars that went into making this film.

A sole member of the often-mentioned indigenous CGI alien race, the Spackle (yes, that’s right), is seen in one fleeting fight scene. The entire species is never seen or utilized in the story again. Almost everything that happens with them is referenced off-camera like so many more interesting parts of the story. The motto of this film seems to be, “Why show it to the audience when we can just talk about it instead.”

The pace of the film is choppy with rapid-fire short scenes that on occasion seem purposeless in that they fail to move the story along. Liman’s shaky-cam is overused at times to make what is happening on camera unwatchable giving the audience yet more time to check their watches to see how much longer this film will go on.

In short, this film is a disaster. Which is a shame considering how many talented and accomplished people worked on it. It just goes to show that filmmaking is a dicey art form that can slip off the rails at any point in the process. “Chaos Walking” started sliding out of control at the beginning in 2011 and never really got back on track. It’s tedious and derivative of so many other better films. The stylistic concepts do not work, and the story isn’t compelling in any way. No matter how great Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley have been in other projects, they cannot pull this movie out of the mud. This film which should have been “let go” is one for audiences to avoid.