Looks stupid as hell, but might be fun, if one can buy into the premise.
Aye. There lies the rub. :) If it came on TV late one night when I was a bit fucked up, I’d gladly watch it.
Looks like a great two dollar rental.
stupid trailers. Wish they hadn’t shown the punch-out scene in the puddle… if a film like this is mostly about the journey then don’t show me which parts are the filler and where it’s going. So annoying.
Gunny Plane.
Haha, yeah that explosion into the plane really is the dumbest. Also at least two “shooting and screaming” shots.
It just really feels like a movie that should have come out summer 1997 starring Sandra Bullock or something. Feels weirdly out of place to me now.
Why are there a bunch of British people on a B-17?
What else would the B stand for?
Seems all the negative user reviews on Metacritic are alt-right manbabies complaining about having a strong female character. Now I’m interested in the film.
If only they all could be women. The male characters seem to be kind of lame.
Wasn’t Max Landis the dude who called the waaaaambulance over Rey being a Mary Sue?
Max Landis was the dude that had a number of issues come out, was fired from this production, and has become kind of a Hollywood hero to MRA types.
It’s hard to overstate just how bad Shadow in the Cloud was, though at least it is mercifully short. Pretty much every single scene is made of stupid. 90% of the time it’s boring stupid, not the fun stupid you might have expected from the trailer.
Half of the movie is Chloe Grace Moretz sitting alone in the turret, talking to the crew over radio. The crew are just cardboard cutouts totally indistinguishable from each other, especially since we get like a couple of minutes with the entire crew before they’re taken off screen. (They tried to fix this by showing little insert clips of each character as an introduction the first time they spoke over radio, which was just cheesy as hell. And didn’t help. Once the crew start off dying one by one, we had zero idea of who just died or what their role was.)
The plot makes no sense. There’s four central mysteries:
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What’s in the package
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Why are the Japanese attacking them where it is supposed to be impossible
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Why is the gremlin attacking them?
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What are there all the seeming hallucinations, like the signal-man, the airplane that disappears on landing, the airplane they see right after takeoff?
What you’d expect is for all these to tie together, i.e. the first point should be explaining the rest of them in some way. Instead they are all completely disconnected, and none of them have anything at all to do with the others. In fact, three of them are not explained at all. They’re just all pure coincidences. The only thing we know is what was in the box, and what’s in the box was stupid and mundane. That’s not how you run a mystery box
Also, the whole reason Chloe Grace Moretz is so absurdy hyper competent at everything is that she is basically supposed to be James Bond, running secret missions for the top brass. Except the twist is that she isn’t. She’s a normal non-combat pilot who forged a document to escape domestic abuse. It’s hard to suspend disbelief when she shoot down every enemy fighter instantly, can climb for several minutes upside down on a plane in-air despite having broken fingers, and win in hand to hand combat against a hyper-strong and agile monster.
As a counter-point, it’s one of my favorite movies from last year. A brash story about female empowerment, but in the tradition of 80s horror movies and EC Comics, directed with confidence and flair by a woman named Roseanne Liang, who laid some excellent groundwork in this short:
It’s especially ironic that the script was apparently wrested from a short Max Landis treatment (honestly, I wish his name had been completely removed). Shadow in the Cloud also brought me around on Chloe Moretz Grace, who would give any scream queen a run for her money with this performance. Liang very smartly sticks to the main character as a way to give the audience perspective on a woman navigating a man’s world, with the B-17 as a microcosm. This is also why you get a quick shot of the characters as they talk to her over the intercom. It’s Maude recalling who’s speaking after meeting them very briefly before being ushered into the ball turret. And you’ll note there are no external shots of the bomber once it takes off because we never see anything that the main character doesn’t see. I love that Liang resisted the temptation a typical (male?) director would have to fawn over what an amazing aircraft the B-17 was. That’s simply not what she’s doing and the movie is better for it.
But, yeah, if you have a problem with the under-the-airplane scene not being realistic – but her finger is broken! – I’m guessing the movie isn’t going to work for you.
-Tom
The complaint isn’t really about realism. If it were, I couldn’t watch another action movie ever. And then I’d rather complain about the trampoline jump from the exploding Zero.
It’s that while the movie implies a backstory for why the character would be capable of these super-human feats, that backstory was explicitly a lie. The character isn’t actually supposed to be special in any way. (Incidentally, it’s funny that the chauvinist crew complaining about how she couldn’t possibly be on a last minute top secret mission were correct, and she was indeed lying).
The point about the camera showing us mainly what Maude can see is great, because that was another place where the movie felt incoherent. What’s the purpose of that? It feels like the combination of her being stuck in the turret with just the radio communication and stuff mysteriously appearing / disappearing are supposed to be setting up for something. E.g. is the audience maybe supposed to be questioning what’s real and what’s not? But none of it goes anywhere. It’s obvious within a couple of minutes that the gremlin is real.
(I say “mainly” rather than “only”, because I thought there was a scene with Quaid getting attacked by the rest of the crew?)
I don’t think the intro popups during the radio conversations were Maude recalling from meeting the people. The shots were totally different, almost anachronistic, and I’m pretty sure they included characters she had not interacted with. It looked more like trying to fix things up in post when it became clear that the audiences couldn’t actually follow who was supposed to be who in those conversations.
Hm. This got me wondering whether the reason this movie feels so incoherent is due to the rewrites. So I found a copy of what purports to be the original script. It seems plausible that’s the case, since the script was definitely posted online years before the movie came out. The only name on the script is Landis.
The dialogue looks basically line for line idential for most of the movie, just very minor substitutions.
- There’s a couple of cut scenes with expositionary dialogue. In the script it’s a an American crew at Hawaii, which I don’t think was the case in the movie. (Movie has a mixed nationality crew, and are flying from NZ. Presumably this was done to get NZ production money.)
- The character intro scenes during the first radio call are not in the script, while other situations where Maude is visualizing something are.
- In the script Maude isn’t “just” a service pilot, but has 200 hours of combat experience in the European theatre.
- They did not change the ending with the “transfer papers”, despite removing the dialogue that explained what that was about.
- The baby wasn’t sedated in the script, but was just supposed to stay silent for a two hour flight. Talk about unrealistic.
In terms of action sequences:
- The first fight against the gremlin is substantially different. Shorter, less ridiculous, and without permanent injuries to Maude.
- The gremlin stealing the baby is substantially different. The script has a boring monologue, but retrieving the baby does not involve the extended climbing outside of the plane. She does not fall off a plane and get trampolined back by an explosion, but an explosion does give her a boost while she is trying to climb through the hydraulics into the cabin.
- The third fight, the fight against the Zeros, the crash landing are substantially the same.
- The final fight ends with the gremlin being shot, rather than stabbed with its own talon.
The script never goes out of focus on Maude, btw, so it looks like that was the original plan.
It seems pretty clear that this was not rewritten even once, let alone multiple times. Why do you think his name should have been stripped off?
In terms of whether the script was better than what was filmed, the changes they did do look straight out worse:
- The script did not have a problem with the unearned hyper-competence: her true background explains the gunnery skills, rescuing the baby is done in a plausible way, and the final fight no longer requires her to be an expert at martial arts. She is still a kick-ass hero, but not a ridiculous one.
- The mystery of the Japanese planes appearing where it should not be possible was introduced by the movie. In the script it’s just stated that Japanes scouting missions that close to Hawaii are unlikely, in the movie it was “they’ll never be able to fly this far south”.
The other problems I had with the movie are present in the original script though.
- It still has a bunch of mysteries that don’t interconnect in any way.
- It still is super inconsistent about what kind of a movie it wants to be.
This movie was overall meh and bit beyond hyperbolic. I guess it didn’t work for me.
As I said, it was to focus on a woman’s perspective in a man’s world. The movie is Maud’s story, not the story of the crew or the airplane or the gremlin.
I couldn’t disagree more. It’s a female empowerment story in which the power of motherhood prevails against all odds, even if the heroine has to literally turn the world upside down and use her bare hands to rip apart the gremlin/dark side of men. Twists and reveals are no more a sign of inconsistency here than they are in any Hitchcock movie.
-Tom
Ok. The script that’s on the Internet is 72 pages long, has sections with large fonts that are mentioned in the interview, as well as being set in Hawaii. So that article seems to confirm that it is indeed legit and the original one by Landis. I read the script yesterday, hours after watching the movie, and posted above the changes I could see having been made. Outside of the differences I mentioned, the movie really is following the script very closely. Definitely scene for scene, and very often line for line.
I’ll happily believe that Liang deserves cowriting credit, even though the changes seem so minor to me. But there’s no conceivable way that would justify removing Landis as the writer, when he entire plot and the vast majority of the dialogue is from his script. Sorry Tom, but I think you might have inadvertently been a fan of Landis’ handling of feminist themes :(
Yeah, might just have to agree to disagree on that part. As an audience member, I love my expectations being subverted by plot reveals. But I don’t think that’s this movie did. It set up mysteries, implied they were interconnected, and rather than resolving them went “that was just an irrelevant inconsistency, don’t worry about it”.
So, SPOILERS past this point, I guess. Just to be safe!
Yep, that looks like a Max Landis script, all right. I’m not about to read the whole thing. Life is too short and I’m well acquainted with how Landis writes. But I did jump to the ending, because I was curious about two moments. The first is Maud sighing and telling her boyfriend “I told you not to let this out of your sight” after she recover the baby, but before she stomps off to kill the gremlin. The second is the breastfeeding scene with the men seated below her. Neither of those is in Landis’ script. Instead, he has her spitting. That’s the final image. Maud spitting. Not Maud breastfeeding. Spitting, like a tough man. Pa-TOOEY! He even writes into the stage directions this tidbit:
How childish can you get?
I’ll bet you dollars to donuts I could read through the rest of the script and point out other differences. But I can also opt to believe the director, the lead actor, and the producer when they all say the project changed dramatically after Landis’ script was reworked and further developed.
Perhaps more importantly, I can make inferences based on having seen other Max Landis movies. I wouldn’t wish Bright or American Ultra on anyone, but feel free to watch those if you want to get a sense for how Landis writes. Chronicle as well. Might as well get Mr. Right under your belt while you’re at it (Anna Kendrick and Sam Rockwell are fun to watch). I don’t see any traces of Shadow in the Cloud’s female empowerment themes in those movies. At all. And given the allegations against Landis, I’m not the least bit surprised.
Similarly, I’m going to make inferences based on watching Liang’s short, which has a lot in common with Shadow in the Cloud. Did you check it out from my link? It’s pretty cool, even (especially?) if you found Shadow in the Cloud problematic. You can see Liang developing the same style and themes evident in Shadow in the Cloud.
That’s an odd assertion and I’d love for you to back it up. Seriously, please point me to any of Landis’ other scripts where I can see these “feminist themes”. I can’t stand Landis. Not just because he’s – allegedly – an entitled Hollywood rich kid who’s used his position of power and privilege to serially abuse woman. I mean, yeah, that sucks. But I mainly can’t stand him because he’s a terrible writer whose scripts are either incomprehensible (Bright) or puerile power fantasies for boys (American Ultra, Chronicle, Mr. Right).
Do you mean the World War II setting in general and the bomber setting in specific as a way to play up the men’s gross behavior? Or the gremlin that is introduced in the movie as a way for men to avoid accountability? Or the domestic abuse that leads to Maud’s subterfuge? Or how she can’t rely on the man she loves? Seems to me everything was connected and a fundamental part of Liang’s theme.
-Tom
EDIT: Oh, and thanks for having this discussion. We talked a bit about the movie in the comments section for the review, but since it was a double-feature review with I’m Your Woman, there wasn’t as much Shadow in the Cloud discussion as I would have liked. Glad to talk to other people who’ve seen it!
Opposite, I was mildly interested because I love Moritz in most things she does, but the premise was a bit weak, but then Gremlins!!! Then it went even dumber and I’m totally on board for this. Is it streaming?
Edit: Rented it for two bucks and was pretty happy with it until the middle, then what the fuck? Who writes this?