Welcome to Memory Holed, a column from MovieWeb deputy editor and film critic Britt Hayes (that’s me). Each week, I’ll revisit the movies (and occasionally TV shows) that were culturally relevant for a brief time before collapsing into obscurity. Whether they were notable for having high-profile casts, generating awards-season buzz, using popular IP, stirring controversy, igniting discourse, or any combination of the above, these movies have been deliberately erased from the pop-culture consciousness. In other words: they’ve been memory-holed.
We’re kicking off 2026 with a new movie starring Daisy Ridley (We Bury the Dead), and I knew immediately that there was only one option for this week’s column: Chaos Walking – ever heard of it? Based on the first novel in Patrick Ness’ dystopian YA trilogy, which had a much cooler title (The Knife of Never Letting Go, some real Dune s**t), Chaos Walking is set in the distant future on a colonized planet, where there are no women, and men’s unfiltered thoughts are constantly broadcast to everyone around them. In other words: Hell.
When it was first announced in 2011, a full decade before its eventual release, Chaos Walking was touted as a possible successor to Twilight. Lionsgate acquired the rights to Ness’ novels and enlisted Charlie Kaufman of all people to adapt it for the big screen. Charlie Kaufman! As in the writer of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and the writer-director of Synecdoche, New York. Yes, that Charlie Kaufman – the brilliant neurotic behind some of the most compelling and incisive existential screenplays in modern cinema.
At the time, it didn’t cross my naive little mind that one of the greatest screenwriters on the planet might need to do what myself and other aspiring writers in their twenties and thirties were doing to get by: take a job to pay the bills. But in the absence of evidence suggesting otherwise – a documented love of the source material, an interest in the book’s ideas and themes – that’s exactly what Kaufman did. An additional four screenwriters took a crack at it, but the final draft of Chaos Walking is credited to Ness and Christopher Ford, a Jon Watts collaborator and co-writer of Spider-Man: Homecoming, which makes sense given the other star of this film: Tom Holland. (If you want to know what Kaufman’s Chaos Walking draft was like, you can find the screenplay online with minimal Googling.)
But we’re not here to talk about Kaufman’s unmade version of Chaos Walking, which I’m not sure would’ve been any better than the version we got: Directed by Doug Liman, who was riding the high of 2014’s Edge of Tomorrow (despite weird post-release revisionism, that is the title of that film), Chaos Walking is a middling-at-best work of dystopian sci-fi featuring a couple of solid performances, a few that stink to high-heaven, and a bizarre disinterest in the world-building necessary for a successful film of its ilk – especially one based on a popular YA series.
Chaos Walking opens by attempting to explain its title with a quote attributed to an unknown character: “The noise is a man’s thoughts unfiltered, and without a filter a man is just… Chaos Walking.” (He might also just be… podcasting.)
Set in the year 2257, on an Earth-like planet colonized by humans and known as “New World” (creative!), Chaos Walking centers on Todd Hewitt, a name you should get used to hearing because Tom Holland will say it no less than 200 times over the course of this film. Todd tries unsuccessfully to use his name as a mantra of sorts to control “the noise,” or the broadcasting of his thoughts and feelings. He lives in a colony outpost known as Prentisstown, overseen by the villainous Mayor Prentiss, played by Mads Mikkelsen, who is sleepwalking through this typecasting while cosplaying as Warren Beatty in McCabe & Mrs. Miller.
There are no women in Prentisstown, where an orphaned young Todd was adopted by two dads, Ben (Demián Bichir) and Cillian (Sons of Anarchy creator Kurt Sutter, who actually really fits the vibe of this place). It might be interesting to explore this patriarchal dynamic, but the movie glides right past it, following Todd around as he does chores, grumbles about farming beets (he hates them as much as Anakin Skywalker hates sand!), and tries to avoid the town’s extremist preacher, played by David Oyelowo. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that Oyelowo is absolutely squandered in this role, which could’ve easily been scrapped, but that would have also eliminated one of the film’s few people of color.
When a spaceship crashes nearby, Todd discovers the sole survivor: Viola (Ridley), who was sent on a scouting mission to find out what happened to the first wave of colonizers after communications lapsed. As Todd understands it, native humanoids known as The Spackle attacked Prentisstown and killed all the women. He’s also been raised to believe that his is the only existing colony on the planet. Both of these things will inevitably be proven false. But first, Todd has to help Viola escape the mayor and his cronies, who want to kill her and loot the much larger cargo ship she came from when it lands.
The pair set off for another colony, Farbranch, where they might be able to seek shelter and make contact with Viola’s cargo ship. En route, they encounter one of The Spackle – a humanoid species that looks like an expressionless Groot covered in mud, but ultimately seems harmless – and a little romance begins awkwardly developing between the two, despite Todd’s inability to keep all his weird thoughts about Viola to himself. These thoughts are mostly “her hair is yellow!” and fantasies about her kissing him, all of which she can see and hear. As it turns out, a world in which you are constantly subjected to hearing men’s thoughts is kind of annoying. And no one involved in the making of this movie figured out how to execute that concept in a way that wasn’t annoying to watch for two hours.
They do things a little differently in Farbranch, which has a woman mayor (Cynthia Erivo?!) and counts numerous women and children among its population. They also have a rule to hang any man who comes from Prentisstown, except for one guy who stumbled over to their camp as a boy, played by Deadwood star and Rectify creator Ray McKinnon – always great to see that guy.
Chaos Walking culminates with Todd learning that Prentiss killed all the women (obviously) because the men couldn’t stand living in a society where the women could hear and see all their thoughts, but they couldn’t know what the women were thinking. It’s this element of the story that seems like it would’ve attracted Charlie Kaufman – a world in which men uncontrollably broadcast their every thought, including their insecurities and their desires, both sexual and violent. There’s a hint of a running theme concerning the latter, as flashbacks show Prentiss serving as a father figure to young Todd, teaching him the importance of “taming” the world around him and exerting his power through the act of killing.
But Chaos Walking has no patience – not for world-building, not for existential quandaries, and certainly not for thoughtful explorations of gender dynamics. It can’t even be bothered to find a satisfying resolution for Todd, who spends the whole film trying to master control of his noise, as Prentiss has, but there’s no contemplation of what successfully quieting one’s noise might mean or the ways in which men are socialized to suppress and ignore their feelings. These are interesting ideas, and I have to assume that Ness’ books engage with them on some level.
While Lionsgate released the first Hunger Games movie after acquiring the rights to Chaos Walking, the studio didn’t push the latter into production until 2017, two years after the release of Mockingjay Part 2. Clearly, Lionsgate was hoping for a repeat, and as we all know, the best creative decisions are made by studio executives trying to milk revenue by duplicating their previous success – which is why Chaos Walking made $27 million against a reported $100-127 million budget and never produced a sequel. Happy New Year!
- Release Date
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March 5, 2021
- Runtime
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109minutes
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
