Chaos Walking
In Prentisstown, Todd has been brought up to believe that the Spackle released a germ that killed all the women and unleashed Noise on the remaining men. After discovering a patch of silence out in the swamp, his surrogate parents immediately tell him that he has to run, leaving him with only a map of New World, a message, and many unanswered questions. He soon discovers the source of the silence: a girl, named.
Chaos Walking Needs More Chaos, Less Walking
By Bilge Ebiri
Daisy Ridley and Tom Holland in Chaos Walking.
Daisy Ridley and Tom Holland in Chaos Walking. Photo: Murray Close/Lionsgate
Some movies should firmly embrace their innate silliness. The evocatively titled science-fiction film Chaos Walking, set on a planet where the human settlers can all hear — and sometimes see — each other’s thoughts, has the kind of premise that sounds intriguing on paper (and before it was a movie it was indeed a best-selling novel by Patrick Ness with the even more evocative title The Knife of Never Letting Go). But once transferred to the screen, this idea likely presented all sorts of problems. Shot in 2017, Doug Liman’s picture has been stuck in reshoot-and-postproduction limbo for some time, presumably because the filmmakers struggled with how best to render the characters’ thoughts (which sounds like something they should have maybe figured out before making a movie about, you know, people who can hear and see each other’s thoughts). The end result is neither here nor there, a muttery mess in which characters ceaselessly ruminate in voice-over, accompanied by wispy purple clouds of thought, while enacting a thoroughly generic Western scenario. You keep waiting for that intriguingly goofy setup to pay off in some meaningful, exciting way. You keep hoping a giant thought bubble will fly out of the bushes and whack someone over the head.
