Chaos Walking (2021)

Chaos Walking arrives as a hundred-million-dollar science fiction production in which every thought is audible and almost nothing else is. Doug Liman directs an adaptation of Patrick Ness's young adult novel with the visible strain of a project that passed through many writers and several rounds of reshoots. The premise concerns a colony planet where interior monologue becomes public noise, an irony the production appears not to have noticed. As a study in social consciousness, the film is remarkably quiet.

The ensemble is diverse by any reasonable measure. Daisy Ridley carries the co-lead, David Oyelowo and Cynthia Erivo appear in support, Demián Bichir fills out the margins. None of this is offered as a statement, and the film never pauses to reflect on it, which places the casting in the category of things that simply happened. Viola, played by Ridley, proves a capable survivor who ends the villain with a well-placed shove, though the film declines to build any argument about gender from the act. Race goes unmentioned. Class goes unmentioned. The hostile terrain of New World is a backdrop, not a cause.

The single moment of ideological texture arrives late, when a diary reveals that the town's men slaughtered its women, unable to bear being unheard inside their own heads. It is a plot twist, delivered briskly, and it registers as narrative mechanics instead of sermon. Everywhere else the film has nothing to say about capital, about the body, about the varieties of the mind, about the historical record. It wants to be an adventure. It is barely that. The thoughts are loud. The message is not. The whole enterprise sank at the box office, and it did so without offending anyone, which may be the saddest verdict available to a film of this size and budget. We are left to classify it, and classification is all we have left to offer it. A quiet specimen. Almost admirably so.

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