Chaos Walking (2021) - Movie Review

I love Patrick Ness’ writing. While I freely admit that I haven’t read his novels, I still have a great affection for the man’s art based purely on his work for the big and small screen. I mentioned in my review for it how much I dug his approach to storytelling with A Monster Calls, and for as little attention as it got, his work on the Doctor Who spin-off Class had quite a few moments of true inspiration within its stunted 8-episode run. At a time when young-adult storytelling has gone from strength to strength in the mainstream, the way Ness approaches incredibly morbid topics like grief, trauma, and loss, has already revealed him to be in the upper echelon of that grouping. So, when news hit that his Chaos Walking trilogy of books were going to get the cinematic treatment, with Ness himself co-writing the script, I was ready for him to impress yet again. What I actually got, though, is… not that.

Let’s start with the main concept behind the story, and indeed the quote that the title comes from: The ‘Noise’. It’s a function of the setting (that being New World, a planet in the process of being colonised by humans), where the thoughts of every man on the planet are not only audible but even visible. The women are immune from the effect directly, but there’s still the whole issue of being able to tell exactly what the guys in the same room are thinking. All the men have no filter anymore, and a man without a filter is just “chaos walking”.

It’s an abstract concept that already works well on the written page, and the way it’s visualised here matches up to that. The Noise itself is shown as this cloud floating around the heads of the male characters, with voice-over accounting for the audible thoughts and even some creative uses for the visual side of things like having the people in memories manifest. The way it’s presented as a thematic tool is quite intriguing as well, acting as metaphor for a specific kind of male insecurity, where the constant sounds and the inability to keep secrets results in hefty paranoia and even some religious tinges as far as how the men view the women on this planet.

But even with the rather unsettling developments that come out of the gender politics on display, it seems like the film at large is holding back on just how unsettling all this could be. The colonial setting, the puritanical view of women, even the simple idea of someone else being able to literally see what you’re thinking; I can’t shake the feeling that there should be more dread permeating the story than there ultimately is. And coming from someone like Patrick Ness, where the mere idea of holding back is at odds with his refreshingly uncompromising look at the dark parts of the human psyche, this is especially out of place.

Well, that might have something to do with how Patrick Ness isn’t alone in the writer’s room for this. And I’m not just talking about co-writer Christopher Ford either; since the original book was first optioned in 2011, there have been a lot of writers brought in for this, with Ness actually showing up later than the others. It started out with Charlie Kaufman (yes, that Charlie Kaufman), then it went through Jamie Linden (Dear John and Money Monster), John Lee Hancock (The Little Things), Lindsay Beer (Sierra Burgess Is A Loser) and Gary Spinelli (American Made), before Ness and Ford also added to it.

The script having that many hands on it goes some way to explain how loose the film’s approach to theme can get, but it also sheds some light on this film’s biggest weakness: The characters. While every actor here does alright with the material presented (Tom Holland in particular was a good choice for the lead), there’s an unfortunate thinness to a lot of them as three-dimensional presences. We get hints of deeper motivation here and there, like with David Oyelowo’s bloody-minded preacher whose Noise is wreathed in fire, or Mads Mikkelsen as the Mayor who has learnt how to hide his Noise, and even Holland as a teenager who has never seen a human woman before, but when all is said and done, they all exist purely for narrative function. It’s quite an accomplishment when the plot is built around knowing so much of what the characters are thinking, and yet it still feels like we barely even know them. And from the mind who gave us such satisfying characters as Conor O’Malley and Ram Singh, that is far below par.

I can’t say that this is bad in any immediate sense, as the main premise combined with the visualisation certainly has the groundwork for a solid flick. But with how much I associate writer Patrick Ness with sharp characterisation and a willingness to dive deep into murky subject matter, something so lacking in both those aspects can’t help but disappoint. I don’t know if the numerous script revisions, or Doug Liman’s direction (seeing as he’s not all that consistent when it comes to more sci-fi tinged production), or just the adaptability of the source material itself is to blame for the results, but all roads still lead to the same conclusion: This should have been so much better based on the attached talent alone.