CHAOS WALKING
Cert 12 ★★
This was shot in 2017, a now-distant era when producers still dreamed of stumbling on the next The Hunger Games at their local bookstore.
But despite four years of post-production tinkering, they still haven’t put a fresh spin on the end of the world.
Based on the first book in Patrick Ness’s Young Adult franchise, the film boasts a decent hook and a stellar pairing of Spider-Man’s Tom Holland and Star Wars’ Daisy Ridley. But it quickly gets bogged down in familiar Young Adult tropes.
The year is 2257 and the setting is the unimaginatively named planet of New World where orphan Todd (Holland) lives in the exclusively male colony of Prentisstown.
After a battle with the alien natives, every survivor has been infected with a condition called The Noise which broadcasts their inner thoughts as random chatter and gaseous images.
So when Todd comes across a crashed spaceship and Ridley’s survivor Viola, he can’t keep the news from Prentisstown’s villainous mayor (Mads Mikkelsen).
There’s plenty of comic and dramatic potential in the idea of men being unable to conceal their inner thoughts but, after Todd goes on the run with Viola, director Doug Liman concentrates on a standard chase movie and a very unconvincing romance.
We could be approaching the “end of days” for postapocalyptic Young Adult sci-fi.