Post by 1godzillafan on Feb 9, 2021 0:48:59 GMT -5
2020 was a year of many things, mostly bullshit. One thing that popped out of it more positively is that there were a lot of films made by female directors that seemed to get championed. Whether it was because so many high profile films made by men failing upwards fled the scene at the sign of COVID is up to interpretation. One thing I know for sure is that four of the tentpole superhero films that were supposed to come out last year were all directed by women (Birds of Prey, Black Widow, Wonder Woman, and Eternals), so perhaps this was always going to be the case.
But it's good to remind ourselves that women are just as capable of making disappointing crap as men. Hooray for equality!
Shadow in the Cloud is directed by New Zealand native Roseanne Liang, who is at fault for a few of its shortcomings, while the rest of it fall squarely on the shoulders of her male screenwriter, Max Landis. This film was in production while Landis was getting cancelled a while back for being Max Landis, and it tried to distance itself through rewrites by Liang. But once with a script by Max Landis, you're still stuck being a movie with a script by Max Landis. This asshole wrote Bright, for fuck's sake. That alone should be enough to put him on some goddamn blacklist somewhere, in addition to him being a rapist.
But you know what pisses me off the most about this movie? Landis has some really good ideas here. And true to Max Landis fashion, he wastes them entirely.
What a FUCKING PRICK.
That statement has nothing to do with the movie. I just felt like saying it.
The movie's premise revolves around that old World War tall tale about how things that go wrong with an airplane are the work of "gremlins," which was just a mask for some asshole not doing his job right. Landis's script seems like it should be a slam dunk, by taking this little idea and doing a "what if it were true?" spin on it by creating a WWII scenario where an aircraft crew contend with a little demon in the sky. At risk of being a little too much "There's a man on the wing of the plane!" Twilight Zone, he then does something that's actually so fucking smart that it caught me off guard, and he saves the vast majority of the budget by sticking the lead character, played by Chloe Grace Moretz, in a ball turret for half the movie with the focus squarely on her. I fucking loved this for several reasons. First, Moretz is up to the challenge of having the focus solely on her during this portion, and she delivers some stellar claustrophobic drama and thrill sequences. The second is that we hear what's going on throughout the rest of the plane through her radio, which allows the other actors to do vocal work as an audio play. In better hands, this could have been a strong idea for a film.
But Max Landis thought of it and of course had to ruin it. Fucking dickhead.
Here's where the screenplay falls apart, and no Landis can't blame a gremlin for his haywire script, there are too many elements in play at the same time. For example, 1917 is a movie sold mostly on its one-take storytelling gimmick but keeps it simple enough to maintain it without being cluttered up and busy. For a while, Shadow in the Cloud seems like it might do so as well, but Landis keeps adding crap in to complicate the scenario. The selling point of the movie is the fact that it's partially a monster movie, but the gremlin itself feels superfluous and disposable. If the film had eliminated the gremlin entirely and just made the antagonist the enemy Japanese planes that cross the aircraft's path at various points in the film, very little of it would have been different. The gremlin comes and goes as too many other things begin happening and there are points where I forgot there was even a monster in this movie, only to have it show up again and for me to exclaim "...the fuck? Oh yeah." All of this is without mentioning the plot twist reveal halfway through where we discover why Moretz is on the plane in the first place and what her mysterious cargo is, which feels like it's one plot point too many. The intent feels like Landis is trying to give Moretz a reason to become a maternal badass like Ripley in Aliens or Sarah Conner in Terminator 2, but the movie turns it into a call-to-arms to just go as crazy as possible for its third act, which it doesn't have the resources to execute.
This is where Roseanne Liang's failings come in. As much as I want to dog Landis for this product, we have to share the blame. If it's true that she rewrote the script, she should have been smart enough to write out some of the stuff she couldn't afford to do. To the movie's credit, the gremlin itself is the most convincing effect in the movie. Everything else just feels like it was filmed on a stage. As mentioned above, Moretz spends most of her time in a turret, which is broken up and full of holes. You would expect after takeoff that there would be the sound of air blowing through these holes, but they kind of sit there. Liang even calls attention to this early on by having Moretz plug one of the holes with a handkerchief, which just falls limply in it. As the gremlin attacks, more damage is done to the windows of turret, but instead of more air blowing inside, it just feels like a minor annoyance to her. She even has a dramatic monologue read which should have been fully drowned out by wind at this point, but it's fully silent except for Moretz. I appreciate that one wants to concentrate on the drama and performances, but when you push this hard for this kind of drama, spitting in the face of reality undercuts it.
This is not mentioning that the third act of the film kicks off with a scene where Moretz climbs out of the turret and battles with the gremlin on the underbelly of the plane, which has little sound other than the score and Moretz's grunting, while it looks like she's being blown on by a $20 fan that was purchased from Wal-Mart with limited wind resistance holding her back. The movie couldn't be less convincing that she was on the outside of an airplane if it tried, but the cherry on top is that it concludes with her losing her grip, only to have a Japanese plane explode under her as she's falling, and have the explosive force knock her back into the plane to safety. That's a lot of bullshit in one sitting.
Director Liang doesn't come off as a complete waste. It feels like she's given a wasteful script and she's too inexperienced to know what she can and can't do and doesn't know when to scale back based on the relative budget available. She might have more promising films in her than this, and I'd be willing to see them. She probably should concentrate on drama and work with action when she has more comforting resources to execute, because this just looks sad, despite the cinematography and overall look of the film being quite good. There has got to be a better version of this film, and it's possible she could have also been the director of that version. There is stuff here I really liked, it just wasn't supported by the ill-created chaos surrounding it.
Max Landis can fuck off, though.
A small bit of internet research will show this movie won the Midnight Madness award at the Toronto Film Festival, which was also awarded to cult classics like The Raid and What We Do In the Shadows. Upon closer inspection it seems a lot of Shadow in the Cloud's competition dropped out due to COVID, which means it was some sort of default winner because it wasn't really going up against much. That seems like the cherry on top of this promising movie that failed to deliver.
