The Doctor’s Diagnosis: C-
Chaos Walking was filmed in 2017, then sat on a shelf, then underwent extensive reshoots in 2019, then sat on a shelf before finally being released to the excitement of seemingly nobody in 2021. The final result is a film so steeped in mediocrity that I must wonder what the fuck was being retooled for the last four years. Based on the first entry in a YA (young adult) book series, we are introduced to the early stages of the same basic story arcs that I’ve seen already in The Maze Runner, Divergent, The Hunger Games, etc. Also like Divergent, the box office numbers indicate that we will never see the intended end of a series with this one. Will the brave, but timid, hero overcome his own internal doubts to learn the truth about society and face the growing threat that has been hiding in plain sight this whole time? The suspense is fucking killing me.
Sometime in the future, Todd (played by Tom Holland) lives on a distant planet that has been colonized by humans. It’s quite a sausage party, though, because all of the women were supposedly killed off years earlier by the planet’s original inhabitants. Also, men on this planet suffer from a strange condition: all of their thoughts are telepathically broadcast and/or displayed for everyone to hear (more on this in a moment). A girl named Viola (played by Daisy Ridley) crash lands on the planet when her spaceship malfunctions, causing the men to hunt her down and Tom to take up the mission of trying to get her (and himself) to safety.
The involuntary telepathy is called “the Noise,” and its equally irritating and nonsensical. The film does not, to the best of my fading memory, make any attempt to explain it or why it only afflicts men. Maybe it is trying to make some comment on how the thought processes of men are more transparent, but I’m just grasping at straws here. The lack of an explanation doesn’t bother me as much as the inconsistency of how it is used. Sometimes it just says your thoughts out loud, sometimes it broadcasts images of the past and sometimes it allows you to project images as a trick or weapon. So, depending on the situation, this is either a serious disability or it’s a fucking superpower and it’s entirely dependent on what’s convenient for the plot at the time. That is some lazy-ass writing. Also, I’m amused by what the movie portrays as the thoughts of men that haven’t seen a woman in 20 fucking years and suddenly have a pretty girl drop into the middle of their colony. At the extreme end, Todd unintentionally thinks about kissing her! Control your fucking thoughts, man! Ladies, to paraphrase the great Larry Miller: If you knew what we were thinking, you would never stop slapping us.
I guess I need to give a SPOILER ALERT here, but the plot twists here are about as unpredictable as the sunrise. First of all, don’t cast Mads Mikkelsen in your movie if the villain is supposed to be a twist. The man looks like he was plotting world domination when he was in the fucking womb. While he is a fine actor, he’s like a modern-day Michael Ironside. As soon as he shows up, we know he is the villain. I know it, you know it, Michael fucking Ironside knows it, so stop fucking around and pretending like I’m supposed to be goddamned surprised that he is the villain.
Now that we’ve established the shocking villain, we move to a plot twist that somehow manages to be both predictable and asinine at the same time. The women weren’t all killed by the planet’s original inhabitants, but by Mads and the other men because the women couldn’t be trusted because their thoughts were still secretive. I have so many issues. First, I don’t buy that the reverse wouldn’t have happened. If I’m a woman on that planet and all of the men’s thoughts were being shouted at me, I would probably break down and slaughter them all in about two days. I would walk outside, hear every man thinking that he wants to bend me over a haystack and I would burn the place to the fucking ground. Second, what is the endgame here? How are you going to reproduce without women? You never even want to have sex again? How are you going to explain this mass murder when people eventually show up from Earth? How the fuck did you keep this secret from the younger men when your thoughts are literally broadcast to everyone? I can more succinctly summarize the film thusly: What the fuck, why the fuck, how the fuck?
A strong cast can’t make up for a standard YA story with plot holes that you could drive a dumptruck through and plot twists so predictable that the film is basically calling you a moron for watching it. While not the worst YA movie that I’ve seen (I’m still pissed about that last Maze Runner movie), the film is likely too dumb and bland even for fans of the genre and completely disposable for non-fans.
One final note: this movie is surprisingly brutal toward animals. I’m a believer that a movie can kill as many people as it wants, but killing an animal is usually a good way to piss off an audience and this thing takes out two horses and a small dog in fairly graphic fashion. The fact that the movie isn’t good prevents this from being a complete kick to the testicles like the death of Artax in The Neverending Story, but that also somehow makes it worse because the movie didn’t earn the moment.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Walking_(film)#/media/File:Chaos_Walking_(film).png
