OPINION | REVIEW: 'Chaos Walking'

The concept of "stream of consciousness," first coined in the late 19th century by a Scottish philosopher, sought, in literary terms, to replicate on the page the cacophony of ideas, feelings, observations and anxieties that run through the mind of a fictive narrator.

Shifting from the God's eye-view of omniscient third-person narrative, stream of consciousness went from the macro to the micro, entering into the mind's eye of its characters. As handled by literary geniuses such as Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, it allowed the careful reader entry-way into something much more emotionally direct and realistic, access to the innermost impulses and thoughts of both the characters and their creators in a fashion that seemed to emulate how our own brains operate, a series of switchboard operators frantically exchanging wires and chaotically plugging them in different jacks in an attempt to keep up with our consciousness.

In film, you will find similar sorts of devices -- usually in the form of a spoken monologue (most recently done with extreme aplomb by Delroy Lindo in Spike Lee's "Da 5 Bloods"), and often as a way of dramatizing a character's mental and emotional deterioration at any given time.

As an example, let's take a sample of Lindo's aforementioned monologue toward the end of Lee's film, which occurs when Lindo's character, a troubled Vietnam vet who has returned to the jungle in order to locate some stashed-away gold with his mates, goes it alone, slashing his way through the underbrush: "you made me malignant," he says directly into the camera, "bathed me in that malignant Agent Orange herbicidal stew ... but I ain't dying from that s * * * . You will not kill Paul. You hear me? Hear me ... I will choose when and how I die. You couldn't kill me then with three tours, you sure in the f* can't kill me now. Right on? Right on. Right on." That is interior voice made exterior (and Lee being Lee, treated as a form of direct address against an unseen enemy), creating insight into the character's inner tensions and philosophy that goes far beyond a standard dialogue piece.

Now, compare that piece of inspired intensity with an example of the "inner thoughts" of Todd Hewitt (Tom Holland), the young protagonist in Doug Limon's new YA-style sci-fi squeezer: "She has a high voice, that's nice," or, "I love that knife," or, later, "Be a man!"

Todd's problem, shared by every living male in his vicinity on the New World, a colony on a distant planet some many years away from Earth, is that his thoughts, every single painfully obvious one of them, are amplified into "noise" that seeps out from his head like a cloud of exhaled breath on a particularly frigid day, which can be heard by anyone within earshot.

Naturally, this condition, which seems to not affect any of the women on the planet, causes significant trouble (not that women, in general, need further proof, but the males' "noise" on this planet offers incontrovertible proof of their banality and base intentions). In Todd's little colony, there was a sort of insurrection against the women led by the Mayor (Mads Mikkelsen, draped in an orange fur that looks like an orangutan), and the Preacher (David Oyelowo, draped in black), which caused a bloodbath and the complete dearth of females in the colony. When a young woman named Viola (Daisy Ridley), the sole survivor of a colonizing ship that broke apart during entry into the atmosphere, shows up one day, the town gets in an uproar: Not only is she female, but she represents the much-heralded "second wave" of colonists that has been said to happen for more than half a century.

Fearing for their positions, the Mayor and the Preacher lead a force to track her down, but not before young Todd takes a fancy to her and is given instructions from his father (Demián Bichir) to head off to another colony some distance away, where women are still very much in charge. With deadly pursuit coming after them, Viola and Todd make their way through the woods, and deep into each other's hearts. It's not easy on either front: There are various obstacles before they arrive at the next colony -- notably lead by a female mayor (Cynthia Erivo), and a vastly more sensible way of life -- while Todd's unfortunately all-too-obvious id ("Is she going to kiss me?!") keeps turning Viola off in a perfectly understandable way.

Based on the novel by Patrick Ness ("The Knife of Never Letting Go"), and a screenplay written by Ness and co-author Christopher Ford, the film follows many of the usual YA maxims when younguns meet and are forced to spend time together (distrust, dislike and alienation, eventually becoming heartfelt desire and deep, abiding devotion), so about the only thing to set it apart from so many other, similarly themed vehicles is the visible interior monologues of the male characters -- if only they weren't all so vapid.

There certainly doesn't appear to be room for any other character development: The film utterly wastes the talents of Mikkelsen and Oyelowo by undercooking their villainous roles to the point where they're mostly defined by their wardrobe. At one point, the Preacher takes the opportunity after barely surviving a rush down teeming rapids -- to drown Todd's beloved dog (yes, yet another film in which our canine hero doesn't make it to the finish line) for absolutely no reason other than the film's desire to make him even more loathsome.

Director Limon has found a niche with such sci-fi gimmickry in the past (the underappreciated "Edge of Tomorrow" was a stand-out of this kind of genre), and the idea of one's innermost thoughts -- much of which, it must be said, are flitting trivialities -- being revealed instantly upon thinking them, is a horrifying burden to contemplate. But instead of following the concept to its more logical and interesting extensions -- people terrified of everyone else, and everyone's inner beings revealed to all -- the film seems content to dance around such worthy complications in order to keep things above-board and cutely saccharine ("I hope this works!").

Along the way, many other ideas are started, and just as suddenly deserted -- the natives of the planet, known as the Spackle, falsely blamed by the evil Mayor for killing all the women, are introduced, and thoroughly dispensed with as a concept about halfway through -- so that the story can focus almost solely on the fate of Todd and Viola's budding relationship, easily the least interesting aspect of the storyline.

"Noise" becomes a wasted detail, in other words, just another bland hook to help the film stand out from so many others that follow its paint-by-numbers style. It's too bad Limon and Ness didn't have more faith in the concept to follow it to a more interesting place -- the kind of thing Andrew Niccol used to do in his sci-fi films: follow a concept to a logical conclusion -- but this effort smacks of rewrites, and reshoots, and much studio interference, with every decision tending toward the bland. As far as the producers are concerned, it's probably just as well you couldn't hear the "noise" from the filmmakers and the crew during production, or it never would have gotten made.