1943. An Allied flight crew are joined by airwoman Garrett (Chloe Grace Moretz) who is on a secret mission. As their plane leaves New Zealand, Garrett notices something moving on one of the wings...
TW: SA
Trigger Warning: reference to sexual assault
This time last year I was watching Underwater, a terrific sci-fi horror starring Kristen Stewart fighting deep sea monsters. That movie exceeded my expectations so I was really looking forward to this.
The parts certainly sounded fun:
Gremlins.
Hit Girl.
Together on a plane.
This movie was made for me.
Shadow in the Cloud also marks a real change of pace for Kiwi filmmaker Roseanne Liang, best known in these parts for the documentary Banana in a Nutshell and the romantic comedy My Wedding and Other Secrets.
She curated a talk James Cameron gave at the University of Auckland last year, and knowing her love for Cameron’s work, I was curious about how she would tackle a project like this.
Ahh, this movie. This movie that I will be thinking about for far longer than it deserves.
If you read this review and then decide to pay to see it, bring drinks and your loudest friends. You may change your mind by the time you reach the end of this blog, but that is the best way to watch it.
We open with a parody of an old military cartoon setting up the idea of gremlins, mythological creatures that supposedly like to sabotage aircraft in midair. This should have been a clue about what kind of movie it was going to be.
When the movie starts, I was a little nervous. Moretz storms in dressed like a cartoon Amelia Earhart with a British accent. There is some plastic-y green screen right at the top of the movie, and some familiar NZ faces are playing non-NZers.
But then Moretz is stuck in the ball gun turret on the underbelly of a flying fortress and the movie turns into a one-woman show.
Even before the gremlin shows up, Garrett (Moretz) is fighting the air crew’s misogyny as they question her credentials, her abilities and her mission. When the gremlin shows up, I thought this was going to be a slightly OTT genre effort with a focus on how men refuse to trust a woman’s judgement, with fatal results.
It seemed a tad obvious, but once Moretz is trapped by herself, I was digging how the movie was going.
And then a big twist completely upends this version of the movie. It is over-the-top melodrama and in any other movie, it would be a horrible miscalculation - the launchpad for a thousand memes and CinemaSins bullshit.
Not here. This movie goes so big it feels like a dare. And then it accelerates again. And again. And...
I am not roasting this movie. There is genuine craft and tension to this movie. And even the ridiculous bits still carry some visceral thrills.
There is an absolutely ridiculous scene involving a midair rescue during a dogfight involving Moretz dangling out the belly of the plane. It did not matter - it involved heights and the filmmakers shot it upside down so I was absolutely terrified.
Before I keep blathering, the filmmakers deserve kudos for making a genre piece with no fat - it is a ridiculous action movie but the filmmakers deserve entry into Valhalla for delivering a movie under 90 minutes. It is something I wish more genre movies (particularly the kind Hollywood has been churning out) would do.
I really want to talk about the ending of the movie. It is the cherry on this ridiculous confection.
Just when you think the movie is about to end, the filmmakers throw in a final set piece that feels like a comment on Moretz’s Hitgirl persona. It is so ridiculous and stupid and amazing and Moretz, bless her heart, plays the whole thing with absolute sincerity straight to camera.
That was the moment I fell in love with the movie.
This movie goes for broke and never de-celerates or tries to be something more than what it is, and it finds the perfectly ridiculous moment to end. And then we get an old-fashioned credit sequence featuring the actors mugging for the camera ala an old World War Two movie or (more appropriately?) Predator.
I was riding a serious high coming out of this movie.
I wanted to watch it again. I wanted to bug all my friends about it. If I ever saw Roseanne Liang on the street, I wanted to give her a double high-five.
I was so excited I wrote my review in about half an hour and posted it. I decided to double-check the credits to make sure I had gotten everyone's name right and that was when I saw that the credited screenwriter is Max Landis.
Landis has been accused of sexual assault by multiple women. For years, he publicly admitted to abusive behaviour. Thankfully, his career has stopped dead.
As regards Shadow in the Cloud, the filmmakers claim his original draft was heavily re-written and he was removed during preproduction. However, since his name remains on the project this means enough of his material made it into the finished film for him to be credited (per Writers Guild of America rules).
I really enjoyed the movie but knowing Landis was involved has polluted the whole experience. All the things I liked about the movie, especially the emphasis on gender and power relationships - it comes with an undercurrent of distaste knowing Landis and his behaviour.
Shadow in the Cloud is a really fun movie, but I would not blame anyone for avoiding it. Hopefully it marks the end of Landis's career, and an opportunity for Roseanne Liang to jump to bigger and better things.
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