Chaos Walking – An Actually Original Premise

3.2

Chaos Walking hit theaters about a month ago, early March 2021, I was out of town, didn’t get a chance to brave the infected masses, or maybe just didn’t want to… but now that its out on PPV, I figured I’d give it a chance.

From what I saw then, Chaos Walking was almost universally crapped on by the critics. And to be honest, I don’t know why. I went into this expecting it to suck, and to be disappointed. And you know what?

I liked it. I thought it was an original premise, and that the producers/director took a lot of chances getting this to the big screen. It’s not a master epic by any means, but its definitely worth a look.

Its the not too distant future, and humanity is putting down roots on other planets. This planet in particular, seems to have afflicted all the human males with the condition that every thought in their brain is manifested outside their head both visually and audibly. Unless you have the ability to exert control over it, which some people have done with varied success… And some have the ability to create believable projections.

Todd (Tom Holland) is one of these men, living in “Prentissville” named after its mayor Prentiss (Mads Mikkelsen). Viola (Daisy Ridley) is the sole survivor of a scouting mission to find out what happened to this particular colony ship. Oh, and female humans aren’t affected by this condition.

Viola is the first human female Todd has seen since his mother died many years ago. The official story is that the native life forms killed all the females because they didn’t have this condition. The reality is (and this is where I spoil the movie, sorry guys) that the men of Prentissville are actually members of a weird apocalyptic cult that believes women are “demon possessed” and need to be killed because their “noise” can’t be seen. Yeah what?

Chaos Walking does get predictable after this point, with head loon Aaron (David Oyelowo) and Prentiss chasing Todd and Viola all the way to the crashed colony ship where Viola needs to send a message to her people to PLEASE DO NOT send any more men down here, mk?

The whole thing with the “noise” is where the critics got their panties all wadded up and quite frankly I don’t know what the problem is. Once you figure out what it is, and that its probably the best, if not the only way to illustrate on-screen what is actually happening…. its not so bad. It wasn’t “distracting” or an annoyance like so many of them said. I found it to be an angle that IMHO worked pretty well, all things considered.

It’s not a spectacular Endgame-level CGI festival full of monsters smashing each other (although there is a fight between Todd and one of the natives…) and while there are a couple of “action” scenes built in , that’s not really the point now is it?

I gave Chaos Walking a 3.2 / 5. Yeah, I did actually find it interesting and not a total drag. I almost wish they’d made it longer and explored the planet and the other villages more. I feel like there was room for improvement. But I would definitely ignore the critics and give Chaos Walking a shot. If nothing else I think it was a decent attempt at an original premise, and that’s worth something to me.

And if you were wondering, it is based on the Chaos Walking book trilogy by Patrick Ness. So there’s definitely room for more.

Official Site: https://chaoswalking.movie/

IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2076822/

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Walking

Rotten Tomatoes: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/chaos_walking

Chaos Walking – An Actually Original Premise

3.2