Chaos Walking (2021)
3/5. Trailer. · Wikipedia entry for the film. · Rotten Tomatoes: 21% critics / 71% audience.
Small confession up front, and honestly part of why I started writing these up instead of just letting them evaporate after watching: I get actors mixed up when I don’t have anyone to talk them through with. This one got queued because I saw “Tom Holland” in the cast and pictured Tom Hardy — wrong guy entirely, I just liked the actor I was thinking of and figured I was in for a sci-fi with him in it. Clearly not what this is. Watched it anyway.
Doug Liman’s premise is the reason to stick around regardless: on this colony planet, every man’s thoughts play out loud and visible as a cloud of noise — his own “Noise” — that anyone nearby can see and hear. Women, for reasons the plot eventually explains, don’t have it. It’s a blunt but genuinely interesting device for a story about gender — women in this world have spent their whole lives able to read every surface thought a man has, while men get nothing back. If women are already unimpressed with men under normal circumstances, I can’t imagine what the verdict would be with the sound on. The film knows exactly what it’s doing by making that literal instead of just implying it.
Where it did a better job than I expected was on the presumptions we carry about people we’ve never met. Viola — the outsider who crash-lands into this all-male settlement — comes from a second colony ship, and it’s a small but well-placed detail that the second-wave colonists on board never once saw Earth themselves; they were born and raised in transit, inheriting a home they only know secondhand. Todd, and the town he’s from, have built up a whole set of assumptions about what “the people from Earth” must be like, and Viola doesn’t match any of them — because she isn’t from Earth in any way that matters to her own experience. It’s a quiet, effective way of making the point that the story you’ve been told about a group of people and the actual people rarely line up.
The part that stuck with me hardest, though, is the town itself. Prentisstown runs on a mix of theology and tribalism — a preacher whipping up the men, a mayor consolidating control, and a founding myth about what happened to the women that turns out to be a cover story for something much uglier the men did themselves. Watching that play out in 2026, with the US still working through what a post-Roe v. Wade landscape actually means in practice, hit differently than it probably would have on release. The film isn’t subtle about it, but it doesn’t need to be — a closed settlement that polices women’s bodies and voices, and dresses the policing up in religious language and stories about outside threats, isn’t exactly speculative fiction right now so much as a mirror held up a few degrees off.
One more thing I’ll say, and I recognize it’s a strange note to land on for a film that’s fundamentally about violent misogyny: Daisy Ridley’s sexuality is barely used. To be specific, since “buttoned-up” undersells her — Viola is a genuine badass at points, capable and active, not sidelined. It’s specifically that she’s dressed and shot as close to sexless as the film can manage while still having a woman on screen. That’s the miscalculation. A story built around men whose every leering thought gets broadcast out loud has an obvious, pointed use for putting its one woman in a position where that leering actually lands on someone — it would have sharpened the film’s own argument, not undercut it, to let the camera and the men’s Noise both clock her the way this world’s men would actually clock her.
That connects to a bigger thing the film pulls its punch on. Todd’s Noise runs almost entirely on him imagining kissing Viola — chaste, PG stuff. I can half-buy that from a kid who’s never laid eyes on a woman before. What I can’t buy is the rest of Prentisstown around him. A town full of grown men who haven’t seen a woman in years, suddenly confronted with one, and the collective Noise stays this tame? Realistically that town’s Noise would be explicit enough to get the film slapped with an NC-17 rating on the spot. The film is, structurally, a G-rated version of what it’s actually arguing men’s unfiltered thoughts look like — which is a strange thing for a movie whose entire premise is “here’s what men actually think” to chicken out of. I get why, for rating and distribution reasons, they didn’t go there. I just think the more explicit version would’ve been the more honest, and probably the more interesting, film — leaning all the way into it would have made the point instead of gesturing at it.
There’s a related beat that bugged me on the same front. At one point Todd strips down to hunt some tentacled creature in a lake for dinner, and Viola’s reaction plays as flustered, almost scandalized. I don’t buy it. She’s not some sheltered farm girl — she’s a kid from a modern, technologically advanced colony ship, a society presumably well past getting rattled by a body. The film wants the moment for a little culture-clash comedy, but it only works if you forget who Viola is supposed to be. It’s a small thing, but it’s the same instinct as the point above: the film keeps reaching for a demure, easily-flustered version of its lead when the premise and her actual backstory both argue for someone much less rattled by nudity than that.
For as much as I’m talking around it, though, I never fully sank into it as a movie. Nothing here felt broken exactly — the ideas above all landed — but something about the experience of watching it kept me a step removed instead of pulled in. I couldn’t tell you a single scene that lost me; it’s more that the sum of it stayed more interesting to think about afterward than it was to sit through in the moment.
3/5. I liked it — that’s the actual score, not a technicality — for the premise and the two or three ideas it actually commits to, the Noise-as- gender-mirror concept and the Prentisstown theocracy angle chief among them. It just never fully closed the distance between “interesting” and “gripping,” and it left at least one obvious tool — its own leading lady — sitting unused on the table.
Research and drafting assistance for this piece, including source verification, was provided by Claude (Anthropic). Plot and reception details are sourced from the Wikipedia and Rotten Tomatoes pages linked above; the analysis and opinions are my own.