Chaos Walking (available by digital rental) is a well made sci-fi young adult yarn with an intriguing premise and strong performances which regrettably cannot reach escape velocity from the downward pull of its insipid script.
It’s the 23rd century. Humanity has colonized a new world amongst distant stars. And on that world people can hear each other’s thoughts. At least the men’s.
Why, we never learn, and it doesn’t particularly matter – it’s all happening far away, it’s the future, and we can just roll with it. Another thing, though, is that all the women have died.
These are the two basic weirdnesses of the otherwise Earth-like world in which protagonist Todd (Tom Holland) is coming of age.
One day his humdrum hayseed existence gets interrupted by a descending shuttle from the second wave of colonists which crash lands outside his village. Its sole survivor is Viola (Daisy Ridley), the first girl he has ever seen.
There’s also a dog, a smattering of aliens, and some angsty inner energy directed toward authority figures, which all and all you would think could get puréed together into some kind of passable YA fare. What turns out to be missing though – and fatally – is any kind of coherent antagonism which builds toward some kind of meaningful conflict.
There is Aaron, a malevolent rambler Todd and others call a preacher, whose audible interior discourse revolves around Tourette’s-like expostulations of religious-sounding phrases like “Judgment!”
There is Mayor Prentiss, who seems like a good enough guy (spoiler alert) until he starts wanting to kill everyone for basically no reason. (This is not quite fair: at first he only wants to kill all the women because he does not like being unable to hear their thoughts – you can decide whether this constitutes a plausible motivation.)
There is also a one-armed alien with whom Todd wrestles for about a minute and then never encounters again (presumably it’s conserving its energies for the sequel which, let’s hope, either figures out a few storytelling fundamentals or never gets made).
Because without a good villain there is nothing for a would-be good guy to do. Or more to the point in the present case, without a real temptation to some kind of real villainy, there is nothing meaningful he can test, refine, and prove.
This is a problem with a lot of the cinema we slop onto the trays of young people today, which I think boils down to deeply naive, unrealistic portrayals of evil.
From a Christian perspective evil may be ultimately irrational, but it is never merely nonsensical.
It is irrational because it means treating something, anything, as more important than the most important thing – shared life with God. But is not nonsensical because that first thing, whatever it is, is truly good.
Real evil, even demonic evil, is not a matter of sheer perverse incomprehensibility, but a matter of tragically misplaced priorities.
From this perspective, evil always makes sense in the sense that it is penultimately rational – only rationality bent to some ultimately self-defeating purpose.
One might argue from these premises that the villainy on display in Chaos Walking is superlatively evil because of the vast disparity between the competing goods: the men would rather murder all the women than be burdened with the unbearable task of asking what they think.
This would indeed be abominable if it were believable. But since the premise is so manifestly silly it becomes a kind of cinematic sinkhole from which no amount of talent – actorly, directorly, or technical – can hope to deliver it.
So the fact that the army of artists involved in this film even attempt to take its topic seriously amounts to the grandest, saddest kind of farce.
You will laugh, you might cry, but not because what you’re seeing is so good. Nor even because it is so evil. But because really, pitiably, it is not enough of either.