Chaos Walking
LIONSGATEStuck in a cycle of countless rewrites in the 2010s, shot in 2017 and then partially reshot in 2019 following poor test screenings, and then delayed for several years, Chaos Walking has all the telltale signs of a failure. It was shaping up to be another botched YA adaptation destined to be forgotten. And yet, shockingly, Chaos Walking manages to overcome its production woes by delivering a well-paced and entertaining, albeit familiar, sci- fi experience.
Set on an alien planet coined New World where all the women have disappeared and the men are affected by a force called "the Noise" that puts all their thoughts on display, the film centers on Todd Hewitt (Tom Holland) and his discovery of Viola (Daisy Ridley), a mysterious girl who crash lands on the planet.
Holland and Ridley are two of the industry’s most likable young actors, and here they continue to show their individual talent while also playing off each other well. Mads Mikkelsen puts in predictably good work here as a fairly underwritten villain, and David Oyelowo is creepy and effective as the secondary antagonist. The rest of the supporting cast – including Demián Bichir, Cynthia Erivo and Nick Jonas – are solid but underutilised, especially Erivo and Jonas.
Doug Liman is a skilled director, and with Chaos Walking, he manages to take what could’ve been a generic YA film and give it a pulse. There’s an energy and a forward momentum that keeps the proceedings interesting the whole way through. Similarly, the cinematography by Ben Seresin is purposefully rough, utilising a lot of handheld sequences to keep things always moving. The screenplay, contributed to by a whole bunch of people but officially credited to Patrick Ness and Christopher Ford, isn’t anything special but is serviceable and puts forth enough character development and decent dialogue to make you care about what’s going on. The main problem is with it is a handful of plot elements, characters, and set-ups that don’t pan out into anything or maybe were intended for a potential sequel. This could be due to the script rewrites, but either way, it makes the film feel like a piece in a puzzle that will most likely never be completed.
It is a shame that the story started in Chaos Walking will probably never be continued, because there is a lot of potential in this universe. It isn’t a perfect film, but for what it is, it’s a compelling journey that stands alongside the Maze Runner films as an example of how to do a sci-fi YA adaptation properly.