[Acid Reviews] Chaos Walking

I'm Todd Hewitt, I'm Todd Hewitt, I'm Todd Hewitt.

This is something you're going to hear more in this movie than good reviews it'll get in total. After my last movie review of Love and Monsters some of you readers may be surprised to hear that this one won't be as positive as I was being super nice to the last one. Unfortunately it's going to be difficult here.

To start off, after hearing what the movie was about I absolutely loved the concept, not only am I a big sci-fi fan but finding out it's on a planet where thoughts are emitted out in the form of clouds so others can both hear and see images of what you're thinking - it would leave unlimited possibilities of what could happen. I instantly thought of the anime TV Series "The Disastrous Life of Saiki K." where viewers can hear every thought of the main person and he himself can hear all the thoughts of others and they turn it into comedy gold but in this movie those jabs at comedy happened way too little and brought forth a chuckle max one time. They had such amazing opportunities to give this movie some more interesting events with the whole "noise" thing as they called it but failed very badly. It wasn't just thoughts, it was wishful thinking, dreams and at some point you could even use noise to trick others and give them an illusion of the surroundings, all of it wasted. The main way they made use of it was by people trying to hide their noise to not give away secrets, which our main character Todd here attempted to do by repeating his name over and over.

The plot is about an explorer ship landing on the planet to check what happened to a colony they dropped off here years ago, very little backstory is given of what happened to earth, why they didn't check on them for so many years, why there hasn't been any communication in the meantime, etc. This planet is now male only and when they find the lone survivor girl who crashlanded they try to take her hostage and she escapes with the help of the main character Todd Hewitt played by Tom Holland.

The connection between the two is very weird, not just because she can hear his every thought and that in and of itself may be a bit too much to throw at someone who just crashlanded onto an alien planet, but she also doesn't talk for the first half of the movie for some reason, so little that even Todd thinks out loud "she talks!" when she eventually does. While they're being chased by the leader of the town you're also introduced to there being natives on the planet as well and blame them for having killed all the "human" women that landed there along with the rest many years ago.

It's a really weird story, I realize it's from a book but they did a really bad job of getting viewers invested in the movie. Only thing I know about Todd is that he's a farmer who has a dog and happens to see the girl first, only thing I know about the town's people is that they have a sheriff who for some reason can control his noise better than literally everyone else, did that make him the sheriff? At no point do they make it obvious why he wants to hunt the girl down, not let her get in contact with the mothership I guess but why? Does he not want to let go of his power? Being the sole leader of a town full of men that won't see the next generation? It's all kind of weird, some of it is made clear in the very end but I really had a hard time following the movie even though I really, really, wanted to like it.

Aside from the noise animations there really wasn't much to showcase today's CGI and what it's capable well. Much of the landscape looked just like back on earth, it felt like they hadn't even tried make the planet look alien even though it looked really different in the beginning as they were landing on it. I was expecting there to be a lot of different changes, evolution having gone a very different way leading to tons of exotic animals, plants, trees, etc being showcased. Not like we have a lack of artists and illustrators to transform a world without limits into whatever they'd want, but instead they barely focused on that and that also killed part of the sci-fi of the movie for me. The amount of interaction with the natives was as short as me smoking the first cigarette of the day - I don't smoke anymore but couldn't come up with a better example without turning it nsfw.

Just hugely disappointed in general from the outcome of this movie with two very good main actors in it and plenty of others. I'd almost be interested in reading the books now just to find out if they're the ones that sucked or if its the movie production, maybe some of you reading this have read them and can let me know. Even better if you watch the movie first too.

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