Review of Chaos Walking (2021) by Viroodiem — 02 Apr 2021

This is the definition of a mixed bag.

On the one hand this film is what it is. Prototypical mindless YA style sci fi fun you waste an evening on, typically in the theaters on "date night" as a comprimise. Has sci fi trapings to appeal one direction and in essence is a love story to appeal another. Resulting in a film you would end up stop paying attention to mid flick and start fooling around with SO in a theater. That is not exactly a bad thing, but in the middle of a PANINI?!

All joking aside, that is what the film basically sets its self out to be and that is a perfectly fine vehicle for producers to ride like they have so many times before.

There are some serious problems with it though.

First off, Tom Holland. While he looks like he exists for no other reason than to play Spiderman, his transition into actual roles is doomed for failure. The kid tries but hes not really that good of an actor. Its also hard to take seriously with the baby face. Even if he is determined to make it long term the best he could hope for is the DiCaprio curse. Decades of being passed over and not taken seriously for how he looks. DiCaprio had the acting chops to brute force his way to an Oscar. Tom Holland never will. His best hope is to ride his spiderman fame to a few middling roles like this one, bank up enough money to live off of, maybe do a few tv series along the way before ultimately fading out of memory.....but I digress. As for this film Holland is mostly a color by numbers warm body to fill the role.

A similar problem comes from his mouseketter counterpart in the form of Ridley. She has no acting skill. This film really highlights how she is like the second coming of Kristen Stewart but her schtick is smiling. Her range runs from Shouting to glaring to "I smile, I cute".

Mads is the highlight of the film and ultimately his talent is squandered on a moustache twirling basic villain. Now if that were the whole criteria the flick would generate maybe as high as a 7.5. It is mechanically put together well. The sound work is solid, the visuals are vibrant. Choreographed scenes like those with animals are a particular strong point for the film. All in all it would be a passable summer popcorn muncher type film.

The nosedive comes from the absolutely toxic and sexist premise of the film. The short of it amounts to "men are bad, Just see how bad they are when women can hear their REAL thoughts." This is absolute paranoid sexist feminist claptrap. The unfounded fears that every man is just a violent animal that either wants to hurt them, subjugate them or turn them into their personal broodmare. The actors are not really at fault for their performances as they are delivering the lines written. The fault comes from the sexists who wrote this pandering to toxic feminist ideology. It promotes the paranoid delusional false narrative women are increasingly developing that makes them look at men as either their ultimate threat lurking around every corner, or they are useless, emasculated men that are too bumbling to be useful for anything. This garbage HAS to stop.

Dont get me wrong, they do a good job packaging this hateful message into a palatable meal. The overall production is not bad at all. You however cannot remove the quality of this film from the propaganda it is built around. That eats off 4 points in my book and tbh it SHOULD remove 6, but again the overall production is solid.