In fact, let me take this a bit backwards – there’s a lot of chaos in Chaos Walking, but only in the sense that attempting to navigate a cohesive arc through its muddled and rambling scenes is a frustrating and messy request. of its audience. Despite its big names, the languid energy of Chaos Walking is certainly not worth browsing.
In theaters this week, Doug Liman’s (Jumper, Edge of Tomorrow) adaptation of the beloved Patrick Ness YA trilogy (Ness was eventually brought in to work on the screenplay alongside Christopher Ford) is hard not to miss. think in the context of his long way to the big screen. Eager for a new franchise to emerge from the shadow of its success with The Hunger Games, Lionsgate acquired the rights to the series ten years ago. It took another five years for the film to find its stars in Star Wars’ Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, who by then were on the verge of becoming some of Hollywood’s hottest stars in their worlds. respective cinematographic.
But the project has been silent for years, delayed from its 2019 release date by the need to perform numerous repeats on a film allegedly described as ‘inevitable’ by Lionsgate employees, then the global coronavirus pandemic. . Now it’s coming out in a calm March, and while so many theaters are still closed for ongoing covid-19 restrictions, it’s being done on a strictly theatrical basis. Knowing all of this, it’s understandable that Chaos Walking makes it seem like Liman ended up with a jumble of disparate scenes to piece together into something that vaguely resembles a cohesive narrative, pushed with little fanfare or perhaps without hope. that it will work well. Because trying to analyze Chaos Walking differently is, well, an exercise in chaos.
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Set on a distant alien planet called New World, Chaos Walking follows Todd Hewitt from the Netherlands. The first wave of human settlers on this world discover that men, and only men, develop a psychic ability known as “Noise” which perpetually projects their inner monologue in a cloud around their heads. Growing up in a colony, Prentisstown, made up entirely of men – after a war between settlers and a native species called Spackle, who apparently wiped out all the women in society – Todd finds himself on a strange quest when he crosses paths with the Ridley’s Viola road. She is a young survivor of a ship crashed by the incoming second wave of human resettlers, who know nothing of what happened to their predecessors. Forced to work with someone whose entire thought process is inadvertently exposed to her, whether she likes it or not, Viola must find a way to contact her fellow settlers to warn them of the trials and tribulations that lie ahead on her. the new World.
It’s an interesting premise, but one that, in the adaptation, Chaos Walking completely fails to explore beyond surface level. The story winds for two hours of what is, for the most part, Todd and Viola marching (to be honest, sometimes they run away from people, like Mads Mikkelsen’s evil mayor, Prentiss, the ruler of the township in which Todd grew up. ). position yourself slowly by getting to know yourself. The effect of the noise itself is used briefly for an interesting effect a few times, such as making mental projections of other people or obstacles as an act of illusion. Otherwise, the Ness and Ford script goes over some of the more interesting questions raised by its central concept, which, combined with its inability to examine why some New World men have greater control over the amount of noise on display, yields the impression that its application is. scattershot.
It’s an issue that persists as Chaos Walking’s slim tale expands beyond the borders of Todd’s home and begins to delve into a larger world he’s been hidden in all of his life. Hints are made on a larger scale in Ness and Ford’s storyline, both from a world-building and character-building perspective, but they are only briefly touched upon before the movie abruptly passes. , without ever having the time to explore beyond the surface. The Spackle, for example, is mentioned several times and almost entirely derogatoryly throughout the film. However, the species are barely seen and don’t really feel relevant to the plot outside of a single throwaway line touching on colonialist themes of humanity’s presence in the New World. Groundwork is also posed for comments on the toxic masculinity that arose out of the all-male society of Prentisstown, but it is put aside, either on the outskirts of Todd’s character arc or to transform Prentiss from Mikkelsen into a more indescribable villain, stealing the film. of any potential energy in the process.
Speaking of the film’s main villains, there are two equally lackluster: the aforementioned Prentiss, who desires to go to war with the other settlements he has hidden from the people of his town, and David Oyelowo’s pastor, Aaron, a worn-out character who exists only to cast vaguely religious omens of doom and occasionally hunt down Todd and Viola. While the former has at least an element of drama in their initial relationship with Todd, Prentiss and Aaron feel so markedly unmotivated beyond the bare minimum to be mean that it’s hard to care for. them. Nothing ever seems to go beyond the potential the film barely deigns to hint at, outside of Noise’s original thought experiment as a concept. Even that doesn’t play out very well in the adaptation, with Liman’s attention instead being drawn to many calm scenes of actors staring at each other, as the limited voiceover of their internal thoughts becomes the dominant exposure tool.
At least Holland and Ridley are doing their best with the material provided. Todd and Viola are reserved young adults by nature, and much of the awkward road of their initially hostile relationship to becoming something potentially romantic is largely sold only by the chemistry of the actors, if not by the script itself. One underlying theme that makes this transition so unnatural is the aforementioned undercurrent of Todd’s concept of masculinity that repeatedly clashes with his budding relationship with Viola. Many of his most stressful encounters with her are preceded by his stimulating external-internal monologue repeating “Be a man!”
Additionally, Todd’s Noise exhibits his physical desire for her on several occasions, and in ways that aren’t portrayed particularly lightly, often to the point that Viola is clearly and legitimately uncomfortable. The sudden shift beyond that initially grimy relationship and into something more as the film suddenly rolls into its climax feels completely unfulfilled as a progression. It reads – and with the context of its production, this seems likely – as if there were several scenes of their affair left on the floor of a cutting room in Liman’s favor evoking an unearned ladder for the procedure at through long shots of them aimlessly and in silence (except for Todd’s almost incessant noise) through pretty forests.
And that’s really just Chaos Walking at large, a series of scenes that work together, but don’t feel at all natural together, sabotaging her half-hearted attempts to find another YA dystopia to become a box office success. . Chaos certainly walks among his muddled intentions, but perhaps not quite in the poetic way that Ness’s original work intended.
Chaos Walking will be released in US theaters on March 5.
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