Chaos Walking (2021)

(Amazon Streaming, November 2022) I am told that the YA Science Fiction trilogy on which Chaos Walking is based is one of the best things ever written lately. I’m told it’s deep and meaningful with great characters and strong themes. Alas, I can’t find much of that in the adaptation. I also gather that the film’s production history was… eventful, with substantial reshoots and reworking of the third act and entire characters cut from the final result. But when I’m watching a film, I’m not necessarily interested in a comparative analysis—my first concern is whether the film works as-is or not, and in the case of Chaos Rising, I’m going for “not.”  It doesn’t help that, in the tradition of much YA SF, the premise only makes sense if you’re willing to treat it as fantasy, allegory or nonsense. Here, humans colonizing an alien planet find out that men can broadcast and hear thoughts, while women don’t—and that inevitably leads to a group of men killing/exiling those mysteriously inscrutable women. (Some of this is hidden behind a conceptual breakthrough plot turn, but only the dullest viewers won’t guess it ahead of time.) If you’re going to go along with that premise, the supplemental hurdle to face is that while veteran director Doug Liman has to innovate a bit of visual grammar in order to present cinematically the prose concept of broadcast/reading minds, what he ends up with is ugly and dull. The literalization of the metaphor (or rather the audio-visual presentation of a literary conceit) is confusing and then irritating—not to mention being unconvincing most of the time. Once you get past that, you still have to confront a number of more traditional failures: the script is dull, the characters are annoying, the third act is very conventional and the entire thing feels as if it’s ill at ease with itself. Daisy Ridley and Tom Holland are not necessarily bad as the leads, but the film around them is a let-down (and, interestingly, seems determined to infantilize their budding romance to a safe PG level), while some very interesting supporting players are barely given any chance to be interesting. (This is a film that wastes Mads Mikkelsen, and that’s saying something.)  Chaos Walking quickly burns through its initial burst of interest, and settles for such a middle-of-the-road, disappointing experience. It’s as if no one learned anything from the YA SF movie boom-and-bust of 2010–2015. Fortunately, its reception was so tepid as to kill any chance of a sequel—which, if I’m understanding correctly, might even have been self-sabotage, as rewrites included material from the next two books in the series. I’m certainly not mourning the lost possibilities: the original books remain for those who want the full experience rather than an inept adaptation.