Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Doug Liman
Starring: Tom Holland, Daisy Ridley, Mads Mikkelsen, Demián Bichir, Cynthia Erivo, Nick Jonas, David
Oyelowo
When it comes to tackling sci-fi stories with tricky premises,
Doug Liman seems to love a challenge. This has paid off for him
in the past, with Edge of Tomorrow reworking
Groundhog Day into a fun action romp. But it's also
backfired, as seen in 2008's Jumper, which took a difficult setup and rendered it a somewhat incoherent
mess. With his latest stab at sci-fi, Chaos Walking, adapted from the first book in a trilogy by author
Patrick Ness, Liman has unfortunately come up short again.
They say men think about sex once every seven seconds. If that's true,
then given its 108 minute running time, the male hero of
Chaos Walking should have thought about sex 925 times by
my calculations. Yet he only thinks about hanky panky a half dozen
times. How do we know this? Because Chaos Walking is set
on a planet solely inhabited by men, and their every thought can be
heard and sometimes seen by both the audience and the other characters
in the film. Awkward!!!
Daisy Ridley is in this sci-fi saga, but she's not playing the
Luke Skywalker surrogate this time. That role goes to
Tom Holland, retreading a lot of his wide-eyed Peter Parker
shtick as teenager Todd, who is bored out of his mind living on a planet
with no girls. That is until a spacecraft on a scouting mission
crashlands, leaving female astronaut Viola (Ridley) alone on the Planet
of the Blokes. Stumbling across Viola Todd hides her from the
settlement's menacing mayor (Mads Mikkelsen) and agrees to escort
her to a far off community which has been kept a secret from him until
now. There it's hoped she'll be able to communicate with her mothership
and exit terra testosterone.
At its core, Chaos Walking is a pretty simple sci-fi
chase thriller dressed up in western garb. What makes it such a mess is
how the film struggles with the idea of Todd and his male cohorts'
thoughts being exposed. Liman visualises this as a purple haze forming
around Todd's head while he constantly blabbers, and the effect is like
a vaping Rain Man. It's no surprise that this quickly becomes very, very
annoying, and there are only a couple of moments where the film does
anything interesting with this concept.
Chaos Walking was shot as far back as 2017 and fell into
post-production limbo as the filmmakers realised they had backed
themselves into a corner with its messy central conceit. There's clearly
a more coherent cut out there somewhere, as this version feels like some
important scenes have been excised. The trek across the wilderness is as
short as my trip to my local Tesco, and a subplot with
David Oyelowo as a religious fanatic is introduced and largely
forgotten about, as is the alien race the settlers have been in conflict
with.
Given how well they've proved themselves in Star Wars and Marvel
properties, the lack of chemistry between Ridley and Holland is
surprising. Much of that is down to the film's struggles to deal with
Viola being exposed to Todd's horny thoughts, which simply can't be
handled in any kind of delicate way. Ultimately,
Chaos Walking fails because it's a sci-fi western with
some high ideas about gender relations that's lumbered with a setup that
would be more at home in a 1980s teen sex comedy. If I could read men's
thoughts, I'd love to see what Liman was thinking when he agreed to
commit this story to the screen.
