Is Chaos Walking as bad as the trades are making it out to be? Or is this Charlie Kaufman scripted adaptation secretly genius?
Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: A boy and girl go on an adventure together in a world where everyone can hear each other’s thoughts.
About: The famed Chaos Walking!!! Based on the best-selling book. The movie that has been edited and re-edited, reshot, double reshot and triple reshot. The movie that Linosgate is determined to get right no matter what. Daisy Ridley joined the project, in large part, because she was a fan of the book. Tom Holland came on board once he learned that he’d be acting opposite Rey Kenobi. After recent reshoots that totaled 15 million dollars, the film is slated to come out at the beginning of next year.
Writer: Charlie Kaufman (based on the novel by Patrick Ness)
Details: 134 pages!
Chaos Walking is one of the most troubled productions in Lionsgate’s history. It’s just been, well, chaos. This despite the film having such a cool cast. Adding a bit of wackiness to the proceedings, one of the most original voices in the industry, Charlie Kaufman, was the first writer hired for the project.
He adapted Patrick Ness’s novel, who had an interesting inspiration for the story which he laid out in a Publisher’s Weekly interview: “I live in England so I take a lot of trains, and you can’t really go anywhere without somebody talking on their mobile phone behind you, forcing you to listen to their conversation. With the Internet, with texting, with networking sites, there’s already information everywhere. The next logical step is, what if you couldn’t get away? How difficult would it be if you could hear what everyone was thinking all of the time? And how much more difficult if you were a teenager, when your thoughts are tumultuous, when privacy is important? I thought this would be pretty awful. So that’s where it started, with the idea of information overload.”
Todd is going to be 13 soon and being 13 in this world makes you a man. What world is that? I have no idea. I thought it was earth at first but apparently there are two moons so unless a new moon showed up uninvited, I’m guessing this is an alien planet.
Speaking of, there’s something everybody experiences on this planet called “noise.” Not the noise you and I are accustomed to. The noise on this planet includes the thoughts of everything. People. Animals. Trees. If something is alive it gives off thoughts and you have to listen to them whether you want to or not. Sort of like if your annoying little sister never shut up. But she was a cactus.
Todd deals with this by talking a lot. To himself. To his stupid dog who he hates. To his foster dads. Todd talks A LOT. And he usually yells when he talks. I don’t know if he’s trying to do a Chris Farley impression or he’s doing it to drown out the noise.
But none of that matters when Father 1 comes up to him and tells him that everything he knows is a lie! That the Mayor of Prentisstown is evil and wants to do horrible things to Todd. That is why his mother left a diary with a map. Todd must go where the map tells him to go to find… I don’t know? Happiness maybe?
Luckily, he meets a girl, Viola, along the way. By the way, all the women on the planet have been killed by an alien virus. So finding a girl is a big deal. The girl doesn’t seem to be able to hear the “noise.” Nor can he hear her thoughts. And since she doesn’t talk much, she’s a big fat mystery to him.
The two head to the next town where Todd runs into more women. This is what solidifies that, yes, he’s been lied to A LOT. But why? Just as he asks that question, the town is attacked by the Prentisstown army. Todd and Viola (and the dog! ruff!) are forced to flee. They are now on a full-fledged Lord of the Rings level journey. Will they find what they’re looking for? I sure as heck hope so.
There are two ways to look at why this project has become such a headache for Lionsgate.
The first is that you adapted an unfilmable story. Just the act of having a constant stream of talking at all times during your movie is a recipe for disaster. That’s literally torture for an audience. And my guess is that that was the biggest issue in the infamously bad test screenings for the movie.
On top of that, you have this secondary “noise” of seeing imagery of things people have done in their past. So if you run into a guy who’s killed someone, you see an image of them killing that person. Combined with, maybe, them picking apples earlier that day. It’s not clear how these images appear. But I guess they show up right next to the person’s face like translucent video. From a movie-perspective that sounds disastrous. It just seems like it would look weird.
So you have something that’s potentially annoying combined with something that’s potentially silly present in the movie at all times – yeah, that sounds like the kind of thing that could cause bad test screenings.
The other way to look at this is that many of the best movies tried something that had never been done before. As weird as Chaos Walking is, the one thing I give it is that it’s trying something new. It really is trying to reinvent the language of cinema. Sort of like the way A Quiet Place played with silence, this is playing with noise.
Regardless of these ambitions, there should only have been one version of noise – sound. This is something I talk about all the time when writing sci-fi and fantasy. You don’t want to make the rules too expansive. That’s how you lose audiences. It’s literally called “noise.” It’s SOUND. Why are you adding a visual component?
How should I explain this? With every additional component of mythology you add, you are taking time away from other components. If you only have the one thing – that everybody hears each other – it’s easier for us to follow along and you can explore that one thing in as much detail as you want.
And hearing thoughts you’re not supposed to hear is full of dramatic possibilities. If that’s the only thing you have to figure out, you can make that work. It’s all the weird wonkiness that Ness added on top of that that’s thrown this story out of orbit.
Why do all women have to be dead??
Why are we on another planet?
Ugh! I get so angry when writers over-complicate things when they don’t have to. Cause that’s one of the quickest ways to tanking a story – over-complicating it. I know it’s tempting with this genre. You want to show us how imaginative you are. But resist the temptation! Keep it simple!
The funny thing is that when you listen to Ness talk about the book, it sounds great. He’s smart and he’s clearly thought all this through. But then you read it and it’s overly complicated and dumb. It’s not the disaster that the media made it out to be. But it still doesn’t work. It’ll be interesting to see what it’s become because they hired every big name writer in the business to come in and fix this thing. I think they really want it to work cause they know they have that killer cast combo of Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Patrick Ness on how he crafted his villain, Mayor Prentiss – “I don’t like people who are just monsters. I think that lets us off the hook, because you think, well, I don’t have to worry about him because he’s just a monster and that’s not how a real human would act. I try to keep him as a man who through various circumstances simply went wrong. Basically, I like to believe that everyone can be redeemed. The potential for redemption has to be in everybody, otherwise there’s no hope for us. Now whether he wants to be redeemed, that’s a different question, but the possibility needs to be there. There’s still some humanity in him somewhere. I think that makes him more interesting as well, because a pure psychopath, a pure monster, is fun, but limited.”
What I learned 2: Ness did something really interesting in the book. He decided when he created Todd that Todd would never say a line of exposition. That he would only say what a real boy would say in that moment. That’s a great writing challenge. To write a main character who isn’t allowed to explain anything. Cause that’s where dialogue becomes the most stilted – when characters are forced to expose things.
