TWO CRAZY GOOD AIRCRAFT MOVIES
Oh, my goodness. SHADOW IN THE CLOUD is so disarmingly bonkers it gets around the incredulity of the story it tells.
Even as you're saying out loud to the screen "no, no... surely not", the film is saying "why, yes, we're doing this."
It's the 85 minute fever dream of a woman about to give birth. Set on a B17 Flying Fortress. In wartime. Starring Chloe Grace Moretz.
(I think it has just become my favourite film of hers - yes, more than KICK ASS and LET ME IN.)
The film's plotting is audacious and breaks every rule, spending maybe half its running time trapped in the bottom ball turret of the plane with Moretz. We barely get to see the men on the plane, we hear only their voices on the intercom, and they may as well all be the same man. Maybe they are "all men", and surely Chloe is dreaming this?
Maybe I'm dreaming it?
(After not really introducing us to any of the men on the plane and then having all their drama happen off-screen via the intercom, the film bizarrely gives each of the flight crew a full cast name against a clip of the character in action during the end credits as though they had been a vital part of the drama, as though we had given a damn about them.)
The weird score by Mahuia Bridgman-Cooper, a mix of Tangerine-Dream and Claudio Simonetti, nudges the film further into delirium, and then Kate Bush ends it with Hounds Of Love, which means NIGHT OF THE DEMON is part of the mix... and I'm definitely dreaming the whole experience.
The film works hard to push against the thing it could so easily have been - a wartime action-horror movie about a Flying Fortress on a mission, a gremlin trying to dismantle the plane mid-flight, enemy aircraft trying to shoot it down - and so it feels genuinely subversive.
At times, I wondered if the whole thing was an attempt by director Roseanne Liang to say fuck-you to Max Landis (who wrote the original screenplay) for the accusations against him of the mistreatment of women. Look what I'm doing to your screenplay, Max. I'm turning it into a celebration of the power of woman.
And Chloe Grace Moretz is super-powerful. What she does in order to get the package back, defeat the gremlin and the enemy, and land the ailing craft is astonishing. You wouldn't believe it if I told you.
It all adds up to a wild and surreal ride, with every step being a mis-step, but somehow adding to the fever-dream beauty of the film.
I loved it, but couldn't recommend it to anybody who likes straight lines and logic.
Available now in the UK on Amazon Prime.
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Ooh… I loved BLOOD RED SKY on Netflix. Vampires and terrorists, a mother and child, the contained space of an aircraft fuselage and all those frightened passengers… terrific, and adds nicely to vampire lore with its characters and the neat flip, which has the vampire as the character for whom we are rooting.
Is there a psychopath on board? Yes, there is. His name is Eightball. He is played by Alexander Scheer and he is a lot of fun to watch.
Peri Baumeister is the mother Nadja and she holds the film together. A super performance.
The film has excellent teeth. Please watch in German / English… never do dubbed.