Chaos Walking could’ve been so much worse

Despite its glittering stars and a popular book series as the source material, Tom Holland’s new movie took 10 years to finally hit screens.

Chaos Walking has had a tortured path to the big screen.

Based off a series of popular young adult sci-fi novels, it was optioned for a movie adaptation a decade ago.

Several rewrites later, including by famed screenwriter Charlie Kaufman at one point, it was filmed in 2017 with a glittering cast including Tom Holland, Daisy Ridley, Mads Mikkelsen, Cynthia Erivo, Demian Bichir and David Oyelowo, and an accomplished action director in Doug Liman.

But the test screenings didn’t fare well and reshoots were ordered but not done until 2019 given its topline stars Holland and Ridley were busy web-slinging and wielding the force in much bigger franchises.

All that goes a long way to explaining why Chaos Walking feels incomplete, and why some of its characters are either underserved or disjointedly jammed in.

Superheroes of a different sense.

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But considering its many production plagues, Chaos Walking actually comes off as a mostly inoffensive, occasionally charming and even sometimes thrilling movie. That’s not to say it’s great, but it’s also not as horrendous as that run-up suggested it would be.

Anyone familiar with the book trilogy may baulk at the simplification of the story’s grand battles between warring factions in the fight for dominance and humanity’s survival but the streamlining makes Chaos Walking much more accessible for the average moviegoer not versed in the intricate power plays of the New World.

The characters have also been aged up, from 13 in the book to late teens in the film.

On a planet known as New World, there’s a human settlement called Prentisstown, run by the Mayor (Mikkelsen). It’s a town populated with only men – the women were all apparently killed by the native inhabitants in a war at some point in the past.

One of those men is Todd Hewitt (Holland), who has never seen a woman or girl. So when a space capsule crash lands near the town and he comes face-to-face with its sole survivor, Viola (Ridley), he awkwardly keeps thinking aloud “yellow hair, pretty”.

They both then have to go on the run, seeking allies further afield.

A visual manifestation of Chaos Walking’s “the noise”.

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In Chaos Walking, “thinking aloud” should be taken literally. It’s a quirk of the planet that all men’s (and boys’) thoughts are projected aloud while dreams and even fantasies are visually manifested for everyone else to hear and see – in-world, it’s called “the noise”.

Chaos Walking does a decent job of establishing its rules with the banal stream-of-consciousness ramblings from Todd while the special effects of an oil slick-like wisp around their heads work well enough for audiences to understand what’s going on.

Albeit the dream projections look a lot like the speech bubbles in The Sims, which definitely bumps.

Chaos Walking relies on the chemistry of its two leads, which isn’t crackling but also not ice cold, and Holland brings a lot of the awkward charm he’s used in the Spider-Man and Avengers movies.

Some of the action sequences are pacy and gripping, which you would expect from someone like Liman who directed the first Bourne movie as well as Go, The Edge of Tomorrow and American Made.

Chaos Walking had a difficult production.

But there is a definite vibe of chopping and changing. There are teases of how “the noise” can be weaponised, almost like Harry Potter’s patronus charm, but it also feels throttled, which could describe Chaos Walking as a whole.

There are characters whose subplots go nowhere, such as Davy Jr, played by Nick Jonas, while Oyelowo’s mad preacher just sometimes pops up with an intensity that belongs in a different movie.

While it often feels as if Chaos Walking wasted its astonishingly talented cast – Erivo is definitely underused – the context is that possibly the studio had bigger ambitions for this film as the launching pad of a Hunger Games-style franchise.

That seems very unlikely to happen now but, hey, it could’ve been worse.

Rating: 2.5/5

Chaos Walking is in cinemas today

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