Chaos Walking — How to Make an Unreleasable Movie | Anatomy Of A Failure

Dude imagine having Mads Mikkelsen and Tom Holland in the same movie and managing to completely drop the ball.

"A broken leg remains broken even after you give it a nice tan." I'm going to say this from now on.

From IMDb: “Tom Holland missed the Avengers: Endgame (2019) premiere because he was busy doing reshoots for Chaos Walking.” Missing the opening of your biggest movie ever to do your worst. That’s why ppl need to pace themselves

This film feels like when you're playing with your friends as a kid, and each kid wants to add something to the game story

This movie is basically: When you have a very good idea to write something down but suddenly when you execute it, you just forgot all the plot, details and concept.

Oh dude, that world is basically a CoD chat when a girl's voice is heard. "Girl?!" "Is that a girl?" "Wait there's a girl here?"

Some books just don’t translate into movies well. Especially if there’s a lot of internal thoughts. Like The Host for example. There’s just no way to put on screen what people are thinking.

I remember walking out of the movie theater, mildly entertained by the concept of it all, and then it hit me. The aliens! They spent time building them up, showed them ONCE, and then we never heard them or their significance mentioned again. Had me busting up as soon as I realized this!

There's a difference between 'High Concept' and 'Concepts We Came Up With When We Were High'

Another week of Filmento talking about a high profile Hollywood movie that I've never heard about until it appears in Anatomy of a Faliure

They represented The Noise so well in this movie, if only the rest of the movie measured up

It’s ironic that its title, Chaos Walking, seems to perfectly sum up the plot of this film. 😂

I swear so many of the things this mans says should be turned in to inspirational quotes

"A broken leg remains broken, even after you give it a nice tan." My new favorite Filmento quote.

This is the fundamental problem with adapting novels into movies. Even when the novel is a low concept, you have to accept that you're going to make a thin, superficial representation of what the novel did, and lean in to the strongest characters to carry the film (think of how much gets cut out of every Grisham or Clancy adaptation). But if it's a novel with lots of world building and complex stuff going on, you either need to ruthlessly rip out all but ONE of those high concepts, or make a goddamn tv show. Your goal needs to be Jurassic Park, not fuckin The Expanse. The Expanse has 'complicated distant future politics', 'involved rules for space travel', 'alien virus', 'noir mystery', and 'precursor hyperspace nexus' all crammed into one story, and it ONLY works because it's a show. If it was a movie it would've been Jupiter Ascending. This shit is established logic, it's madness that people keep getting it wrong with millions of dollars on hand.

This feels like a several novel YA serires having been crammed into one movie.

"Every thought you have can be seen and heard by everyone" Ah yes, every introvert's worst nightmare

The whole youtube tax thing being a transition into a sponsorship was a better plot twist than what was in the movie.

As a reader of all three books of Chaos Walking, I was super stoked when they announced a Chaos Walking movie that is featuring very big names. The books are absolutely incredible in almost all aspects and has incredible writing that can get me deeply immersed in without even trying too hard. The story is full of fear, anxiety, suspense, curiosity, adventure, and discovery. So imagine how disappointed I am when the movie dropped and turns out like this. I shouldn't have watched it.

The thing with the main concept of the Noise is that it fundamentally changes pretty much every aspect of daily-life human interaction. Add on top of that the concept of not having any women and the landscape changes entirely, you basically have a worldbuilding conundrum in your hands as a writer. No longer can there be large groups of people together, because said groups will eventually splinter due to people always knowing what the other person thinks. Interpersonal relationships will be much more based on trust. How do you keep sanity in a place where all the time your own thoughts are being projected? How does the social contract (specially among men, where we're usually taught as children to guard our emotions and be tough and strong) alter the way people interact? On top of that, think of all the functions and characteristics the Noise brings up: how does it work? does it project only surface level thoughts or deeper thoughts of the subconcious? Does it project dreams as well? Does seeing your own thoughts bring up other thoughts and so you risk end up thinking on another thing entirely different of what you were doing at the moment? Do male animals have it as well? Do they have thoughts? How do you control it? Some people would probably start some form of religion or mentalism in order to not think at all. Would people act much more on emotion rather than critical thinking? Also, as a quick sidenote, the whole western angle as well has a lot of potential. The understanding I got from the film at least is that the majority of the colonizers that first arrived decided to not terraform the planet and instead established themselves into small, Amish-like settlements and leaving the machinery behind. Wouldn't that be an interesting motivation for the villain? Maybe they are afraid of more colonizers arriving and destroying the paradise they have made for themselves and bringing "civilization" to their very own wild west (and also maybe they're scared of being you know, judged for murder1ng an entire town's female population). There yoiu have some nice parallels to the real life american frontier in the late 1800's and also a nice touch of worldbuilding.