Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Chaos Walking’ on Hulu, a High-Concept Sci-fi Mess That Wastes Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley

Now on Hulu, Chaos Walking has no shortage of talent: Director Doug Liman (Go, The Bourne Identity, Edge of Tomorrow) adapts award-winning YA-sci-fi novel The Knife of Never Letting Go — written by Patrick Ness, also of A Monster Calls fame — with a cast including current Spider-Man Tom Holland, Star Wars breakout Daisy Ridley and current man of the hour Mads Mikkelsen. Anyway, all this makes for some terrific namedropping, but the film ends up being a classic case of a project that doesn’t live up to the sum of its parts. Blame a screenwriter pileup (some trivia for you: of all people, Charlie Kaufman wrote the first draft), cruddy test screenings, delayed reshoots and a dragged-out release that found the final product dumped into theaters mid-pandemic, which was essentially just Lionsgate clearing its plate and getting the whole thing the hell over with. Which isn’t to say the film doesn’t have some redeeming qualities, right? I’ll be the judge of that.

CHAOS WALKING: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It’s 2257. One assumes we f—ed up Earth, because some humans migrated to a planet to which they gave a very basic-vanilla name, New World. The planet kind of looks like a Canadian forest, most likely because Canada offers a 25 percent refund on qualified film-production expenses. People live their lives in New World just like Western pioneers, with horses and leather duds and such, except sometimes they blast stuff with ray guns. It’s some rough business, mostly because all the men on the planet are afflicted with “the noise,” a condition that renders their every thought audible to everyone, visually manifesting with an emanation that looks like a cloud of iridescent cigarette smoke. Sometimes, the noise even projects imagery, of an old memory or some horrible fictional nightmare concoction. We meet Todd (Holland), a lowly beet farmer in Prentisstown. Shit really sucks in this place, because beets are gross, and the thoroughfare is mostly mud and it’s lorded over by a real sleazebaggano named Mayor Prentiss (Mikkelsen) and all the women are dead, slaughtered by the native species, dubbed the Spackle.

No women you say? Right, but the potentially compelling subtext of such a reality is left buried under a miserable pile of metaphorical beets, so don’t expect much there. As for the non-metaphorical beets, one presumes that Earthling colonizers could plant and harvest anything they wanted, so why not grow potatoes or carrots or something less miserable than beets? Could be worse, I guess; they could’ve opted for turnips. Anyway. Todd lives with his father (Demian Bichir) and who I think is his father’s boyfriend, Cillian (Kurt Sutter), and when they’re not getting filthy as shit toiling in the beet fields, they’re hunched over a table in a dim cabin, mutterin’ and eatin’ beets. We eventually learn that there’s a giant trough of apples in their barn. WHY AREN’T THEY EATING THE GOD DAMN APPLES? Instead of the misery root, Todd grimly points out, that turns your turds red? Don’t ask that question.

The reason we find out about the apples is, there’s a scene in the barn where Todd hangs out with a girl. A girl? Yes. A human girl named Viola (Ridley). Her spaceship crashed nearby and she was the only survivor, just the space girl in her space pants with her space satchel and space bangs. This is when an important plot point about “the noise” is revealed — women don’t experience it. Their thoughts are forever to themselves. If Mayor Mads Mikkelsen found out about Viola, there’d be trouble. But everyone’s thoughts are continuously manifesting in the air, cluttering the earspace, so of course the Mayor finds out about her, and concocts a nefarious plan, prompting Todd to help Viola R-U-N-N-O-F-T so she can phone home. They clamber through the woods and Todd drops all his trou to murder a half-seen tentacle monster in the lake like it ain’t no thing, all while Viola watches, aghast. Turns out, tentacle monster grilled over the campfire is about 10,000 times better than beets. Meanwhile, Todd tries to squish down his thoughts about how cute Viola is, and how nice she’d be to kiss, but like any dude trying to hide his boner at the beach, it doesn’t always work. No spoilers, but I don’t think this movie works either.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Chaos Walking has a sliver of an offbeat Edge of Tomorrow vibe thanks to Liman, but that’s where the nice comparisons end. It’s from the sci-fi/Western niche, which includes groaners like Cowboys and Aliens, The Dark Tower and Wild Wild West. And it has the ambitious premise/lousy execution dynamic of dud sci-fi eyerollers like Cloud Atlas and Jupiter Ascending — and that’s the TRUE-TRUE.

Performance Worth Watching: The cast is coated with a thick veneer of blandness, rendering everyone nice and uniformly dull. I guess watching Mads Mikkelsen wear a flamboyant fur duster and cowboy hat and almost getting a chance to chew the scenery is better than nothing.

Memorable Dialogue: “CONTROL YOUR NOISE, TODD.”

Sex and Skin: None. TBTNTTAFTF: Too Busy Trying Not To Think About F—ing To F—.

Our Take: Cool premise, how everyone’s persistent, omnipresent, unavoidable thoughts make existence nigh-intolerable. It ties in the toxicest of toxic masculinity too, so the social media metaphor kind of holds up if you’re watching the movie out of the corner of your eye and eating a sandwich and deathscrolling through your news feed at the same time. Chaos Walking tries to shove 20 pounds of beets into a two-pound bag, and therefore half-assedly builds its world. There’s a lot of characters and scads of concept and oodles of thematic dynamics waiting to be explored, but it’s all rendered slapdash, the material just begging for a TV series instead of a standalone film, assuming some enterprising individual could figure out a way to make “the noise” look less silly.

The film never sets any “rules” for “the noise” — thoughts seem to manifest mostly when the plot needs them to, and there’s never an explanation for any of it, or any backstory, or even a myth or anecdote as to why it only afflicts men. Some characters can control “the noise” better than others and some can use it to project holograms of things that aren’t there, but why? Because otherwise the story would seize up like an engine that just leaked its last drop of oil, that’s why. And of course some ugly truths about this civilization come to light, because no story like this ever was about an incident or three in a shitty society, it always has to be an epic about tearing down the shitty society, about saving everyone before you save yourself. Society is being upended, yet again. I yawn.

Despite a fleeting moment or two of excitement — motorcycle chase, shootout, high drama on the river rapids — the film progresses predictably. Cynthia Erivo is given a nothing role; David Oyelowo plays a laughably insane preacher whose “noise” manifests brimstone; Nick Jonas plays a jerk you want to punch; the terrific Ray McKinnon gets two scenes and then, somewhat amusingly, he’s blown to smithereens. An encounter with a Spackle lets the story touch on the problematic idea of colonization, but only briefly. I mean, there’s all kinds of romantic tension between Ridley and Holland it would rather try fruitlessly to develop — their chemistry is DOA, and the movie busts match after match on the side of the box trying to ignite it. SHE lived on a high-tech spaceship her whole life. HE lived in a relatively primitive all-male society. There’s all kinds of potential here, but the movie is intent on being a generic sci-fi actioner with some neat FX and not much else. Beets can be made into delicious plates; Chaos Walking is content to boil them into mush.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Just beet it.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Where to stream Chaos Walking