The pleasures found in engaging with dystopian narratives have to do with a certain distance. While examining contemporary tendencies carried out to their intensely unpleasant conclusions, these fictions are safely removed. They give the morbidly curious various scenarios while also reassuring us that our current society, while seemingly beyond repair, could be far more worse. Author Patrick Ness took the pearl-clutching idea of humanity overloaded with information, added a dash of gender politics, and crafted the
Chaos Walking trilogy, which, after extensive delays and various creative dance partners, has finally been birthed by Ness (with co-writer Christopher Ford) and director Doug Liman (
Star Wars and
Daisy Ridley and
Tom Holland, respectively, but rewrites, poor test screenings, and other various behind-the-scenes problems would shelve the movie until it became a strange relic of another time. And that’s what
Chaos Walking is: a relic, but an odd one at that, one that bears all the hallmarks of a standard YA dystopian movie, but with a shockingly grim and dark tone that appears to be part of an ill-conceived attempt to set it apart from the pack.
Based on the first book of
Patrick Ness‘
, The Knife of Never Letting Go,
Chaos Walking is set in a distant future, on a distant planet colonized by humans. But on this planet, no women remain while the men are all afflicted by “the Noise,” a force that puts all their thoughts on display. Holland stars as Todd Hewitt, a boy living in the settlement of Prentisstown who has particular trouble controlling his “Noise,” his thoughts spilling out in a barrage of images and whispered half-thoughts, which t
If you think men are annoying in our world, wait till you get a load of them on the planet New World in “Chaos Walking,” the once highly anticipated prospective tentpole starring Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley. Based on the award-winning young-adult science fiction series by Patrick Ness specifically the first novel, “The Knife of Never Letting Go” the movie has taken nearly a decade to reach the screen after being announced by Lionsgate in 2011. To say expectations have waned would be an understatement.
The studio, looking to continue its success with franchises such as “Twilight” and “The Hunger Games,” went through numerous writers, including, ahem, Charlie Kaufman (Ness and Christopher Ford receive final credit), and potential directors before starting production in 2017 with Doug Liman behind the camera. Reshoots, overseen by Fede Alvarez because Liman was unavailable, were pushed until 2019 due to the stars’ schedules, further delaying the release, which wa
Chaos Walking, the sci-fi movie starring Daisy Ridley, Tom Holland, and Mads Mikkelsen, is making its way to theaters on March 5. The origins of the film, however, go back 13 years to when the first book of Patrick Ness
Chaos Walking trilogy came out.
In both the book and the film, the story follows Todd (Holland), a young man who discovers Viola (Ridley) after her ship crash lands on his planet. Viola is the first female Todd has ever seen all the women on the planet have been killed off, and all the men are afflicted by The Noise, a germ that puts all their thoughts on display. The mayor of Todd s town (Mikkelsen) has bad plans for Viola, and so she and Todd flee the town and find out everything is not what it seems.