I’m just looking to have a fun time at the cinema. Seriously, I’ve seen some serious movies in the past month, but Shadow in the Cloud looks bonkers; it looks like Tomb Raider meets Suckerpunch – I’m down. A popcorn flick, if ever I saw one.
In the midst of World War II, Flight Officer Maude Garrett (Chloe Grace Moretz) boards a flight out of New Zealand at the last moment, with a top-tier directive, and a secret assignment to guard a mysterious package. The all-male flight crew are perturbed, and make a rough introduction of their new female passenger. Garrett must sit in the… gun-ball?… is that what it’s called? The small shooter pit below a fighter plane that reminds you of where Han Solo told Luke Skywalker ‘don’t get cocky’ in Star Wars – Google tells me it’s called a ball turret, huh. Anyway, Garrett must sit in a ball turret for take-off, with an arrangement that Staff Sergeant Walter Quaid (Taylor John Smith) will keep her package safe, sealed and upright on the top deck until it’s safe for Garrett to come back up. Before all this, we, the audience, are shown an educational flight cartoon, that points out that ‘gremlins’ are creatures that incompetent pilots use as a foolish excuse when things go wrong in the air; gremlins couldn’t actually be real, could they? With Garrett and the crew navigating a rough storm, and on the lookout for Japanese enemy fighters, Garrett thinks she sees something strange on the plane’s wing too; a shadow in the cloud, if you will.
You know, Roald Dahl wrote a children’s book on ‘Gremlins’ for Disney before writing his other books that made him famous, and since Dahl was a wartime fighter pilot before an author, I’d say he had some insider knowledge on this gremlin legend, although I’d never heard of it. Of course, there’s the famous The Twilight Zone segment, parodied in The Simpsons using the school bus, where there’s a creature on the wing of a commercial airplane, and William Shatner or John Lithgow go insane trying to convince everyone they’re in danger. Chris Columbus wrote his own version of the critters in 1984’s Gremlins, as well, but this Shadow in the Cloud gremlin must have been on the juice; it looks like that Pokémon, Noivern, and the Man-Bat from Batman: The Animated Series. I thought it looked awesome; something the paranoid animalistic side of my brain was urging me to scan the darkened theatre for, just in case the creatures were real. This snarling flight-wrecker uses sonic pulses through its tongue! Although the feature is only shown once, that’s pretty cool.
I worried about Chloe Grace Moretz having to put on an English accent and carry this movie, but boy does she carry it. Stuck in that ball turret for half the movie, it is her expression and ability to relate a range of emotions that keep this movie tense. Moretz has always looked comfortable when placed in dirty and mature scenes, over a career starting from when she was just a little girl; the smack her character has to react to in Shadow in the Cloud is openly lewd, holding her vulnerable, combative and then ultimately stoic in her resolution. It’s a grand performance. It looks like Shadow in the Cloud must have been a fun time to film too; the closing cast credits come with actors breaking character, conveying levity on set. In the movie, Moretz gets to pretend she’s scaling the outside of a moving plane, to an elevating soundtrack of 80s-style synthesisers; the colour scheme, obvious green-screen and outdated score somehow adds to the charm of this movie, pursuing a crazy storyline and self-aware of itself in going about it. Then, at the end, that troublesome gremlin goes too far, and Moretz gets this crazy look in her eyes, and our blessed Hit-Girl from Kick-Ass is back! Take it as a lesson to all you no-good gremlins out there; don’t ever get in between a woman and her knapsack – I would love to see the behind-the-scenes footage of Chloe Grace Moretz getting geed up for a bare-knuckle fight scene with a giant gremlin to the death; yeah, this movie is nuttier than a squirrel’s winter stash.
J. J. Abrams mystery box device for story-telling shows up with a vengeance in this movie, as a few twists and turns always come back to needing to know what the hell is so important about that package? Is it a baby gremlin, or is it an award-winning recipe for chilli? It could be anything and I want to know! But, as Mr. Abrams has surely come to learn by now, the tighter you tune up the audience’s expectations, the bigger the release when the mystery is revealed, and that’s a lot of endless possibilities to live up to. In the moment, for my first watch, I was deflated, as the true story behind who Garrett actually is, and the contents of that package are not as interesting as the competent cagy badass that starts out as an unknown. But it is what it is, and if that’s what has to happen to get us the final stages of this movie, then it’s worth it, boy howdy! This movie’s action-packed race to the end is indulgent; apparently, your life is more in peril when you say a sexist thing – a chaotic and less convenient kill-count would have been appreciated, considering the dangers these characters are facing, but it’s not the first movie to take liberties in defence of its own moral values, and it won’t be the last. But, in the final moments, I only had one big question – we have quite a number of great female action heroes, but how many of them are mothers? Maude Garrett wouldn’t be a hard costume to pull off at future dress-up parties either; all you’d need is a jumpsuit and a leathery bag. I really love how this movie ends boldly; recognising a proud and often overlooked past, with the black-and-white footage of female pioneer pilots, and a look towards the future – the burning of the ‘fun-time’ gal on the side of the airplane, and a proud mother overlooking her domain, doing something that only a mother can. This is an action movie of the new age.
3.5
Misti
Great post!