Much like with Ava late last year, I was initially debating whether I’d even deign to watch this movie at all, let alone review it, and for largely the same reason: The abusive history of the guy who wrote it. Only this isn’t a niche example like Matthew Newton, as Max Landis has had people distancing themselves from him as early as 2012’s Chronicle, his first feature-length script.
Considering it and American Ultra are the only good movies with his name attached to them (and even then, it’s the presentation that makes those two memorable, not necessarily the writing), there’s other reasons to be sceptical about this one… but again, like with Ava, I don’t see disregarding the work of women in the industry off the back of one toxic guy to be all that helpful a move, although to her credit, director and co-writer (we’ll get to that) Roseanne Liang gets why audiences might distance themselves from this film based on his involvement. I, however, am not going to advocate for that. Instead, I’m going to declare proudly that this is a fantastic film that is more than worth checking out.
This is a wild sit, largely taking place in the ball turret of a B-17 bomber during an ostensibly routine flight from Auckland to Samoa, with flight officer Maude (Chloë Grace Moretz) trying to fend off enemy planes, gremlins, and even the other officers on the same plane. It’s a quite tense and claustrophobic affair, as we don’t really leave Maude’s side for the trimmed-down 83-minute entirety, and Moretz has frankly never been better than she is here. Her performance carries the bulk of the action and drama found here, and whether she’s physically fending off attackers or verbally fending off dickheads, she is the vibrant core of this production.
The production values around her are solid too, using a lot of old-school B-movie aesthetic in the war-time set design, the surreal red-and-green colour palette to highlight the disconnect between the voices of Maude’s fellow crew and the fact that they are rarely seen on-screen throughout, and especially the solo-character framing of the narrative. Mahuia Bridgman-Cooper’s soundtrack is a big part of that appeal, with all kinds of glorious Tangerine Dream-esque synth work and a combination of 808s and organic drums to heighten the tension and atmosphere even more so than the stakes of the plot as is.
If anyone saw the mention of gremlins above and thought of either the famous Christmas horror movie or William Shatner losing his shit on a plane, bear in mind that this isn’t so much a re-do of those as much as it taps into the same source: Gremlins as a quasi-supernatural embodiment of shit going wrong while a plane is in mid-flight. More specifically, though, it’s the setup for a story all about the lengths to which the male soldiers on the B-17 will go to put the blame on anyone else for their own fuck-ups other than themselves. And sure enough, Maude is part of that equation as well, as she cops an extraordinary amount of flak by people too busy arguing to realise that none of this is even remotely helping the situation.
Sure, the gremlin itself turns out to be real, but because of the B-movie recklessness at play with the pacing and the bonkers plot progression, it manages to skate by that potential hiccup to build on the story of Maude herself, an officer on a top-secret mission whose sheer capability on the firing line is matched only by her lack of willingness to put up with anyone else’s bullshit. It’s B-movie as feminist iconography, and considering the role of women during war-time (if they weren’t brought onto the front line to fill out the numbers, they were keeping the home economy running by joining the workforce), it makes for a surprisingly smooth bridge between the intent, the delivery, and the ability of the people doing said delivery.
And to make matters even better, that whole Landis credit thing? Even that becomes part of the overall message in a more meta context, as his credit should realistically be more of a ‘story’ credit (if even that much), since Liang rewrote most of what turns up in the finished product. This was partly because of Max’s behind-the-scenes fuckery sparking a want for change during production, but also because, going by Liang’s own descriptions of Landis’ original draft, it likely would’ve needed to be re-worked because it was that undercooked.
In the words of Landis himself: “I write scripts the way a lot of people play ‘Angry Birds’”. Having sat through most of his movies to date, I can totally see how they would all be products of a lot of inconsistent trial-and-error, where any success is largely arbitrary because of the conditions under which they occur. It makes sense of why it usually ends up being the directors who make or break any of his scripts that make it to the screen, and it also makes for a certain poetic irony that it would end up being a woman who would turn something of his into a worthwhile feature, even more so than Trank did with Chronicle or Nourizadeh did with American Ultra.
To put it more simply, this is the first film of 2021 that I have been genuinely excited about. It’s the kind of low-key bombast that should be a lot more plentiful than it is, yet likely wouldn’t have been given the chance to shine as it has if it weren’t for the studio system at large still scrambling to function under COVID lockdown; the big boys are busy trying to maximise profit, while Roseanne Liang and co. are busy maximising fun at the movies. It’s a creature-feature war-horror-action-thriller feminist-statement mini-miracle of a flick, and while part of me is happy just knowing that this exists at all, the rest of me is quite ecstatic that it turned out as entertaining, gripping, and fist-pumpingly righteous as it did.
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