Chaos walking is a 2021 movie with Tom Holland, Daisy Ridley and Mads Mikkelsen. It is a sci-fy film about terraforming another planet; in spite of its premises, the encounter with the autochthonous aliens of the new planet and equilibrium, or lack of it, is largely left unexplained. It chooses rather to concentrate on the dynamic between the settlers and how they deal with the fact that males are unable to hide their thoughts: everything they think is repeated for everyone to hear and that is the setting of the world.
Tom Holland, in my personal opinion, shows promise and has the capability to further grow as an actor. With due time, perseverance, training and good roles he will become one of those actors worthy of praise. In this particular case, especially in the first half of the movie, given that he has to try to hide his thoughts (referred to as “noise”) from the others, he relies mostly on facial expressions. Even in fights or “silent” bickering, he conveys the emotions of his inner dimension without uttering a word. A voiceover of his thoughts enables the audience to understand what he is thinking, but in many cases his facial expressions are more than sufficient; the viewer understands his emotion even before hearing his words.
Given the fact that it is a recent movie, I will not spoil any points of the plot (the setting is explained in the first minutes anyway). There is however something to be said about the differences between saying, thinking and what is left unsaid. As mentioned, the male settlers are unable to hide their thoughts and this leads to them saying what they are thinking. The question of how this would be possible, given the amount of thoughts a human is capable of, will not be explored. What is interesting to note is however the fragile equilibrium, or lack of in this case, that a similar dynamic constitutes. The fact that we have just a limited control on what we think and that many of our thoughts are either nonsensical, hypothetical scenarios or even things we do not actually mean is partially rendered in this movie. This philosophical point of the unsaid confronted with the inability to hide what is thought would branch out in many other complications. How could the “appel du vide” be explained if not as an irrational thought that a person would never actually act upon? How would one person perceive the innermost perspective of another and accept it, especially if these are thoughts of lust, greed or absurd scenarios? The movie does not pretend to explore such themes, but at least tries to highlight them.
Chaos walking is a good enough movie with good actors; it is not groundbreaking or mind-blowing by any standards, but it is worth the watch. What it does is however open a series of debates similar to the ones I tried to briefly mention.
I would give this movie a mild 7 out of 10 “pennies for your thoughts”.