Chaos Walking, review: women read men’s thoughts, annoying apocalypse ensues
Dir: Doug Liman. Cast: Tom Holland, Daisy Ridley, Mads Mikkelsen, Cynthia Erivo, Demián Bichir, David Oyelowo, Nick Jonas. 12A cert, 109 mins
It takes around three minutes for Chaos Walking to fully set out its premise, and around three seconds more for everyone watching to realise it’s not going to work. Doug Liman’s young-adult science-fiction adventure unfolds on a faraway planet whose human colonisers have fallen prey to what must be the most embarrassing virus in the universe. This infection – which is both omnipresent and untreatable – renders every male of the species’ inner monologue both audible and visible: passing thoughts pop out in Tourette’s-like bursts, while the images in their minds’ eyes dance around their heads as holographic blobs.
This is exactly the kind of idea that might have mileage on the page – and in fact did, in the acclaimed series of novels by Patrick Ness on which Chaos Walking was based. But on screen, it’s irritating beyond measure. Imagine trying to watch a film in which almost every character on screen is constantly muttering to themselves and usually has their face obscured by computer-generated purple wisps. Now imagine hearing a pitch for said film and deciding to spend ￡70 million on it. The second of those things actually happened at the studio Lionsgate ten years ago, but there’s still time to save yourself from the first.
Tom Holland is the man whose job it is to ease the viewer into the cacophony. He plays Todd Hewitt, which is a name you won’t easily forget, since one of the mantras he keeps repeating in order to conceal his thoughts from others is “I am Todd Hewitt”. Todd’s home is Prentisstown, a grubby, future-Western frontier settlement presided over by Mads Mikkelsen’s fur-coat-enfolded mayor.
The place is an entirely female-free zone, owing to a long-ago massacre of its womenfolk by the planet’s natives, a race of generic grey aliens called the Spackle. Or at least that’s the mayor’s story – though anyone who reflects for a split second on what life might be like if every woman could hear exactly what was going on inside the head of every nearby man might well surmise there may be an alternative explanation for their absence.
As such, Todd’s first encounter with a person of the opposite sex is when one comes plummeting out of the sky. Her name is Viola (Daisy Ridley), and she is the sole survivor of another colonial mission, and has to be protected from Prentisstown’s inhabitants at all costs. A lengthy cross-country trek ensues – to give Chaos Walking its due, it more than delivers on the walking – during which Viola is regularly appalled by her companion’s (exceedingly tame) teenage fantasies, which he involuntarily broadcasts to everyone within earshot, when he isn’t chuntering on about something else.
Drab of palette, po of face, and perfectly in step with the finger-waggy sexual politics of the age, Chaos Walking feels like a belated attempt by Lionsgate to fill the Hunger Games-shaped hole in its portfolio, with young leads drawn from the Marvel and Star Wars stables to give it a head start. (The film was mostly shot back in 2017, but required a flurry of reshoots two years later: one of the perils of casting the stars of existing franchises is there doesn’t tend to be much give in their schedules.)
On camera, however, Holland and Ridley have all the rapport of two tree trunks, and the deeper dramatic and comedic possibilities of the one-way torrent of intimate thoughts between them goes bafflingly unexplored. Perhaps the overarching conceit of Chaos Walking might just be impossible to render convincingly in motion-picture form, but when the film ends up being psychologically outmanoeuvred by the old Mel Gibson comedy What Women Want into the bargain, it’s not good news.
Available via VoD from tomorrow