Chaos Walking - Movie Review

Some films I've noticed throughout the years have something weird about them that makes them fascinating. Sometimes it's the visuals, sometimes a choice in actors, sometimes it's just a name. Coming up very soon is an action film called Nobody, starring Bob Odenkirk, who some might know from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul as James "Jimmy" McGill/ Saul Goodman. Weird choice to star in an action film, but trailers have shown him kicking ass and in interview he says he put in two years of martial arts training to prepare. But some weird elements of a film might not be as successful. This brings us to Chaos Walking.

Chaos Walking is about a planet called New World, where all men on the planet have their thoughts on display because a phenomenon called "The Noise". One of these men is a young one named Tod Hewitt (Tom Holland), a local kid who lives on a ranch with his father and uncle. Meanwhile in space a crew is descending upon the planet, including a girl named Viola (Daisy Ridley), but The Noise causes the ship to crash. Stranded, both discover each other and quickly go on the run from David Prentiss (Mads Mikkelsen), the cunning Mayor of Tod's town, who wants Viola for some mysterious reason. Now Tod and Viola, along with Tod's dog, must travel the planet to get Viola off and back to her people.

This film was originally planned to be released on March 1st, 2019, but due to bad test screenings the film went through some reshoots. So is it better? I can't tell because I wasn't there for the test screenings, but this version of the film failed on a lot of things. The acting wasn't bad, but it wasn't good, the story is a big jumble, and I couldn't care much for what happened to anybody in the film. Doug Liman is credited as directing this movie, and as the man who made great films such as The Bourne Identity and Edge of Tomorrow my interest was caught and I was curious to see this film in theaters. But sadly the script he was given to work with was not in his favor. This review will contain a few spoilers.

Apparently Chaos Walking is a compendium of a trilogy of books of the same name. Compressing three books into a film just over an hour and a half long is a very, very bad idea. The books, from what I've ready about them, have won a ton of awards for its excellent use of themes such as gender politics, redemption, and the meaning of war. I might download the first book, The Knife of Never Letting Go, on Audible in the near future. But yeah... not the film. The concept of a world where everyone's' thoughts are on display is a very interesting one and that was another big reason why I was interested in this movie. I'll go into it later, but they don't really use this concept very well, or at least never use it to its fullest degree.

All the main actors of the film are talented and have proven themselves in the past to be excellent in a lot of films. I love Mads Mikkelsen, he's a very talented man! Tom Holland of course everyone knows as Spiderman from the MCU. And Daisy Ridley... well, I don't like her character of Rey from the Star Wars sequels, but I think that's more of bad scripts and terrible handling of a billion dollar franchise than her acting. But in this movie, where you can hear everyone’s thoughts, you barely know or learn anything about them. They're pretty boring and dull and I just mindlessly following them throughout most of this movie. Plus there are characters that are prominent throughout the film, yet don't have much of a purpose to the story. The biggest of these characters is Aaron (David Oyelowo), a radical priest wants men to never silence their Noise and who is hunting Viola because he believes she's some sort of angel. He's doing his thing and then he basically disappears near the end of the film.

Now there is an element of the movie that really put me off, something that I felt very uncomfortable with and something I think that creators of the film (hopefully) didn't realize: The implied violence against/ abuse of women. I mean when we first start the film we see that Tod's village is all men. No women or little girls whatever. It's the reason why Tod takes such an interest in Viola at first and how he just keeps following her. At first we're told that the reason there are no women about the town is because a race of creatures called the Spackle killed them all during a war. But, spoil later on we find out they were all murdered by the men in the village after the mayor brainwashed the men into thinking they're dangerous. This goes even further with a scene where Tom Holland strips naked a few feet from Daisy Ridley to go swimming, which at first I had a laugh at before realizing how uncomfortable that must have made Daisy Ridley/ Viola. There are few other moments like this sprinkled throughout the film and it just feels very off-putting and disturbing.

So let's get into the idea of this concept of thoughts always being on display. Taking some time to think about this idea after finishing the film I thought to myself, "If our thoughts were always on display it would really bother people, possibly drive some so mad that they'd get violent. A whole town of people with this condition would eventually result it utter chaos and the eventual destruction of the town." For instance, what if I accidentally remember a song and suddenly it's stuck in my head? If my thought were on display it would just continually loop itself and the tenants in the apartment below me would probably be angry and yell at me to shut up. Simple situations like that, forgetting what to get for groceries, or any other random thoughts would have been helpful in making this story element more apparent and integrated with the world.

This doesn't really happen though in Chaos Walking, the Noise is mostly used to progress the story or for Tod to think about how pretty Viola is. There has to be more in Tod's head then a girl and a safe place to travel to. We find out later that David Prentiss can weaponize the Noise to create illusions, but that's never properly explained with our only piece of info on that is when the priest Aaron tells David, "You use your Noise like a woman," which is sexist and is implied in a demeaning way (further pushing the abuse of women in this film). Not much time is given to this concept to really make it feel important and I was continually wishing the film would use some of its time to see how it deeply affects other people. There was only one scene that did this, when Tod goes to the mayor to tell him about the crashed ship and Viola. As he's going down the street his Noise is loud and disrupting the folk around him and suddenly is crowd is following Tod because he's riled them all up with his thoughts. But beyond that the Noise isn't a very memorable story idea.

The biggest problem with this movie though, besides the abuse against women, is the story and writing. I've already been hinting at this with how the movie deals with the Noise and how the characters don't have much to them, but this whole film feels like a bunch of story segments roughly stitched together. I could follow where the story was going, but I feel other people will be scratching their heads and getting lost because there are some major location and story jumps throughout Chaos Walking. Again, I haven't read the books yet, but I'm pretty sure they have a lot to work with as they have three books to work from. Why wasn't this split into three films?

On a positive note I did kind of like the world the film was set in. Yes it was similar to Earth in a few ways and some of the CGI on the creatures was not the greatest, but the world did feel pretty real to me. It was the way the actors, especially Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley, interacted with the environments. They did a lot of climbing and hiking and it felt like they were getting dirty as they trekked to their final destination. There was a sense of adventure between the two and that at least will keep some people in their seats. The towns as well looked well constructed and fitting for the world, with a lot of wood while also having a bit of futuristic tech to it.

Chaos Walking is a film that feels like it butchered a really good idea. It's not the worst film I've reviewed on this channel, definitely not that bad of a movie because I can see people going to this movie and decently enjoying it. However I found it had a messy story, some poorly cooked concepts, and some surprising and disturbing moments of sexism and violence against women. That last one especially makes me say that this film is not worth watching or paying money to see. From what I've learned about the original source material, this film could have been epic if it had better script to it and several more movies instead of just one. So yeah, I wouldn't recommend this film.

Tentative Score: 4/10

Definitive Score: 3/10

At least Daisy Ridley took some notes from Star Wars and learned to not leave her mouth open while other actors did their lines.