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“Chaos Walking” is a science fiction western film based on the first of a trilogy of young adult novels by Patrick Ness. The film is set on a colonized planet where men’s thoughts can be heard by those around them. The premise makes for an intriguing starting point for a genre film, and the way Ness, co-screenwriter Christopher Ford, and director Doug Liman (“The Bourne Identity,” “Go”) visualize it is intriguing as well, with characters’ thoughts and feelings swirling around their heads in a purple-blue, wreath-like haze that evokes scientists’ models of how airborne infections spread. When viewed from a distance, every character who suffers from this affliction appears to have a mood ring around their neck. There are shots of enraged mobs where you can see their negative thoughts pulsing through their heads. Individual thoughts are also conveyed through snippets of voice-over narration, which appear and disappear in the course of conversations in the manner of an anxious comic book character’s thought balloons (“Keep walking, keep walking,” “Don’t let them know she’s in the barn!”), among other things. “Noise” is the term used to describe all of this.
We’re getting ahead of ourselves here—this review hasn’t even begun to describe what the film is about—but it’s easy to do because “Chaos Walking” is more satisfying to contemplate than it is to watch, which makes it a good choice for this review. “Chaos Walking,” a film starring two Disney franchise stars, Tom Holland (aka the MCU Spider-Man) and Daisy Ridley (Rey from the “Star Wars” sequels), is set in the future and stars Tom Holland (aka the MCU Spider-Man) and Daisy Ridley (Rey from the “Star Wars” sequels). Earthlings have abandoned their degraded homeworld in order to establish new systems. Todd Hewitt, Holland’s character, is the naive teenage son of a farmer (Demian Bechir) in a small village on a backwater planet named Prentisstown, and he is the protagonist of the film. It appears that the colonists in this area have been forgotten about.
There are no females to be found. The indigenous population (including Todd’s mother) is said to have killed all of the women during a conflict with the colonizers, according to the story. In the village, David Prentiss, played by Mads Mikkelsen, has established a religion of enforced, ritualized hyper-masculinity, with men affirming that they derive strength from The Noise around their heads, chastising themselves and each other for showing weakness and expressing feelings, and persecuting any man who does so on the grounds that he is “acting like a woman.”
In this macho cesspool, Ridley’s character, Viola Eade, is thrown when the spacecraft carrying her to the planet malfunctions, dumping her in the woods outside of town as the sole survivor of a horrific crash. Todd, of course, discovers her and develops feelings for her, and it’s only a matter of time before he finds himself in the position of having to protect her from an all-male mob, the majority of whom have never seen a real, live “girl” before. Viola doesn’t really require protection; she is mechanically capable and has the ability to fight. However, she will require the assistance of a guide through the wilderness in order to locate a transmitter left over from a previous mission, which will allow her to call for assistance.
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Pretty soon, we’ll be in the territory of a benevolent science-fiction drama like “E.T.” or “Starman,” in which a psychically bonded duo, one of whom is more highly evolved than the other, solves a complex problem. The question of which of these two is better equipped for survival, of course, is debatable). Even though Todd is a more skilled fighter and assassin, The Noise in his head keeps giving away his location as well as the thoughts he wishes to keep private. The science fiction elements coexist with a wilderness survival film aspect, as well as fragments of an old-fashioned Hollywood Western about the politics of a civilization in a “frontier” built on colonized land, in addition to other elements of the film. The film contains an element of a love story, although Todd’s essentially sexualless, pre-adolescent approach to women and Ridley’s super-capable, big-sisterly vibes (which she also brought to the “Star Wars” films) ensure that any chemistry between them is suppressed or re-directed.
We are disappointed that “Chaos Walking” only briefly explores the history of the indigenous race of humanoids who were forced into submission by the humans and who are alleged to have burdened the surviving humans with audible and visible thoughts, as if cursing them for the sins they committed. A native is introduced in a brief, violent action sequence; he (or she?) is missing an arm from the elbow down. However, there is a great deal of detail that is overlooked in the rush to get Viola and Todd to the transmitting station. Despite Liman’s mastery of stagecrafting large-scale yet intimate action scenes, the film falls short of providing more world-building and philosophical-theological debate, as well as more insight into the history of this colonized world, which resonates with stories of genocide against indigenous people in the United States and other countries (Australia and Japan also make excellent “Westerns”) and alludes to mythology and scripture (Todd is frequently depicted as being seated in a temple).
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Another subtly humorous comment on the differences between masculine and feminine identity as it is typically constructed by societies can be found in the piece as well. Men are very easy to read, for better and for worse, whereas women keep secrets and have ancient knowledge that can heal the men. We don’t get much more than a few slivers of any of this, to be honest. With a running time of less than two hours, the film attempts to cover as much ground as an entire season of a television show while moving at the pace of a trailer. When the film takes a breather, as in a lengthy scene in which one character reads aloud to another, you can catch a glimpse of the simpler, more focused, and more rewarding film that could have been made instead.
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To be fair, “Chaos Walking” finds itself in a precarious position on the market and appears to have chosen to practice self-censorship in order to continue to exist. In terms of budget, it’s a sci-fi film with a $100 million budget, which isn’t small by any means, but it’s also not huge by the standards of Star Wars or Marvel, which routinely spend anywhere from $250 to $400 million on a single film. Perhaps the goal was to entice new audiences with action and (potential) romance, as well as the (relative) star power of Ridley and Holland, before delving deeper into the weeds in subsequent installments of the series. However, much of what was shown on screen felt unfinished, which was a poor strategy for attempting to capture people’s imaginations and compel them to demand sequels. What’s the point of playing it safe if the outcome is the same as if you’d gone all in instead of playing it safe?
Given that Ridley and Holland are delivering superb, unaffected performances as characters that we really care about in a setting that’s been built out just enough to make you fixate on the tantalizing unanswered questions that the film will never do more than glance at, this is particularly frustrating. Aspects that have been undernourished include the toxic masculinity cult that Prentiss has nurtured and encouraged over time. A firebrand played by David Oyelowo, his chief acolyte has internalized everything the high priest taught him, growing into a radical revolutionary who already believes he would make a better leader of men than the high priest himself. Mikkelsen’s approach to his underwritten character is mesmerizing, as is often the case with this performer’s approach to his characters. He’s always on the verge of becoming hammy, thanks to his horseback riding, his lavish fur coat and floppy-brimmed hat, which channel all of the decadent fops that Marlon Brando played after middle age, and his delivery of his lines, which is a combination of purring Euro-cadence and frontier drawl. There is no denying that he, like Lebowski’s rug, manages to bring the whole thing together in some strange and mysterious way.
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We owe a debt of gratitude to Liman and his collaborators (which included a sound team consisting of more than three dozen people) for presenting us with something we haven’t seen before, with the exception of a few isolated scenes or sequences in telepathic horror or superhero films where the main characters must learn how to selectively screen out the data that their highly advanced senses/brains are vacuuming up. A new kind of cinematic headspace is created by “Choos Walking,” which gradually instructs the viewer on how to watch the film. When you first see these characters, it takes some getting used to their interactions with one another, particularly the way they shield their thoughts from others by repeating neutral words and phrases like mantras, and the way their hidden or revealed thoughts are visualized in the halos around their heads.
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However, once you’re immersed, it’s a powerful experience that stays with you long after the film’s numerous disappointments have begun to fade. Can anyone survive even an hour in a world like this without going insane or making someone else want to kill them? Is it even possible? “…If my thought-dreams could be seen/You’d put my head in a guillotine,” sings Bob Dylan in the song “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).”
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