Chaos Walking came out this year, but this isn't the first time the world has heard about this film. The production for Chaos Walking began all the way back in 2017. The film struggled to put out a reliable release date, but eventually settled on a 2019 time frame. However, the film would undergo several more reshoots (which began in 2019) before the crew would finally release the finished film in 2021. Along the way, the film had several writers work on the script including Charlie
Kaufman; but whatever changes were made to film was enough to not even credit those originals writers. What happened behind the scenes to make this film take so long to release and yet still seem unfinished?
Chaos Walking is about a futuristic colony on a planet known as 'New World,' in which all women have been killed or relocated. The men left in a colony called Prentisstown have been given the Noise—an affliction that causes all of their thoughts to be projected outside of their heads. The male lead Todd (played by Tom Holland) discovers a girl (Viola—played by Daisy Ridley) who has crashed landed on the planet.
This film has some major star power in it. Tom Holland is most known for his portrayal of Spiderman. Daisy Ridley was boosted into stardom for her work in Star Wars. Mads Mikkelsen—who plays the lead role in Hannibal—has a major supporting role as the antagonist. Even Nick Jonas is in this movie. The acting power is there but the movie still falls flat on its back with the messy plot and confusing, unexplained need to escape the planet.
If this is the final product, one can only assume how bad the footage and story must have been before all of the reshoots. There doesn't appear to be a clear direction for what the movie is trying to say or what the purpose of it all is. It's a movie that seems to bring up unanswered questions every twenty minutes. This is just speculation, but perhaps the writers and crew knew that what they had made was convoluted and confusing, and decided they needed to basically reshoot and edit this film so far past what it originally was that it was unrecognizable to anyone working on it in the earlier stages. If it is confusing now, it must have even given the editors a headache trying to make sense of the story enough to make a coherent film.
Aside from the messy plot, the two main characters don't have any real chemistry and are even sort of pitted against each other for the majority of the beginning of their relationship. It makes it hard for audiences to see the point in them working together, and doesn't make a meaningful connection between characters. Their strange relationship is thrown on top of the plot point of the 'bad guys' chasing them. But it never really makes sense why the villains are chasing them in the first place. Audiences will have a hard time getting invested in any of the characters much less the main characters.
The scenes in Chaos Walking are put together in a chaotic way. They seem to jump from one to the next without having any obvious connection. Charlie Kaufman originally started working on the script back in 2014, but for some reason left the project. After that, the first draft took six other writers as well as the author of the original book to revise the script. It was changed so much that Kaufman is not included in the credits in any way—perhaps he asked to be left out of this one. The author is now one of the only people to be credited for the screenplay.
As mentioned before, the filming of Chaos Walking began in 2017 and was originally set to be released in 2019. But it was later deemed unwatchable and was not allowed to be released. So in 2019, the filmmakers had to order reshoots. The film has sat around for a couple of years but is now finally able to be watched. Fans of the book say that the movie is very different from the original source material because the film was made as a stand-alone in case it wasn't able to get any sequels.
The film cost $100 million to produce and has been out for nearly two months and has only managed to make $21 million. Although Chaos Walking has some cool ideas and the novel series is worth the read, the film failed for many reasons that seem to stem from a lack of a clear direction. The themes in the young adult fiction series are very relevant topics, but sadly for whatever reason, the movie just couldn't get it together.