Chaos Walking

 

Chaos Walking is a 2021 dystopian YA sci-fi film based off of book one, “The Knife of Never Letting Go” of the series Chaos Walking written by Patrick Ness. The film takes place in the future, where people have had to leave Earth and find a new planet to live on. On this planet, Todd Hewitt lives in a town of only men living in fear of a group of native creatures called the “Spackle” who supposedly killed all of the women in the town. Everyone can hear everyone’s thoughts, but this only affects the men on the planet. Some can control it better than others in town, but not Todd Hewit. The story follows Todd who comes across a girl, and he can’t hear her thoughts, but she can hear his. The two of them discover the real reason the women were killed, and are on the run from the townspeople. The film stars Daisy Ridley, Tom Holland, Nick Jonas, and Mads Mikkelsen.




For those who don’t know, this film originally began production in 2017, saw poor test screenings, and was set to undergo reshoots in 2018. Due to Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley’s conflicting schedules with Marvel and Star Wars, reshoots were not able to happen until 2019, two years after the film had started shooting. Like many other films, it was slotted for a 2020 release but was ultimately pushed until 2021, five years since it was initially shot. This is one of the messiest productions I have ever seen and honestly, I am surprised the movie even got made and released. It is honestly pretty sad that this movie never lived up to its potential given the source material and a cast like this. Only for this movie to finally come out amidst a global pandemic. I think the story of how this film was produced is more interesting than the actual movie. I never got to see this in theatres but honestly, it was not worth it. The vision for this film is simply all over the place. 




The film is pretty choppy and doesn’t have a good flow. Then it ends very abruptly, with no real closure to the story. There is no real structure to the story at all. One thing I did like about the film was the acting. With a cast like this, it's hard to go wrong with that part of the film. One thing I really didn't like was since the thoughts of others or “the noise” is projected in front of them, you had this weird floating purple/green blur in front of the characters when they were thinking. It was actually a really annoying part of the movie. I understand it to a point that it made sense because it was supposed to be annoying for the men in the town, but as a viewer, it was not great visually. 




If you want to see this film it is available on Amazon Prime. It's sad that this movie could have been so much more, but with Daisy Ridley and Tom Holland in their respective and successful franchises, I don’t think they ever would have been able to make more movies in this series happen realistically. I think this film had potential if the right director and people were in charge. This was supposed to be the beginning of a new Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, Divergent, type series, and now it would shock me if they were to ever do a second Chaos Walking movie. Most people don’t even know this film exists, which is crazy given its cast. The film cost 125 million dollars to make and only made back 26.9 million dollars at the box office. Another aspect of why this film didn’t do so well despite its reshoots nightmare, bad luck, and a global pandemic, is that people aren’t watching YA dystopian films anymore. The wave of success those types of movies had was so brief and it is sort of gone now. So to conclude, not the best movie, a bit of a nightmare, but it goes to show you how important production is, no matter how great the concept or cast is.