Premise: In a dystopian future on a colonized planet where men's thoughts can be seen and heard, the village is rocked when a woman arrives.
I can point to dozens of small gripes that make Chaos Walking not great. But, let me be blunt. This movie is bad because of all the noise. If the movie did everything else the same but somehow found a way to pull off the mind reading gimmick, then it would be straddling the fresh line on Rotten Tomatoes rather than sitting with a 22%. I'm reminded of my friend who would play low frequency sounds that you couldn't detect but would cause you to get irritated. It worked, but the "success" of it working meant that I got irritated. Chaos Walking successfully depicts the constant struggle to keep one's thoughts focused by making it constant and distracting. That sucked. I had trouble appreciating any of the production design or the excellent cast. I spent the entire movie mildly irritated by Tom Holland's thoughts never shutting up.
That problem is baked into the movie. That's the whole premise. I doubt there's any way to pull off the thought broadcasting in a semi-accurate way that wouldn't suck to watch. I respect that Doug Liman and company thought they could find a way, but they couldn't. They didn't help themselves either. The visual effects to indicate thought activity and the attempts to visualize the thoughts were more distracting than informative. It was like watching the entire movie with a smudge on my glasses that I couldn't wipe off.
The rest of the movie is fine, I guess. I saw it because I am always happy to see a movie starring Daisy Ridley and Tom Holland. I didn't even know that it had Mads Mikkelsen, Demian Bichir, Cynthia Erivo, Nick Jonas, and David Oyelowo too. That's the cast of a potentially badass movie. The premise is about as thought out as most SciFi movies of its ilk are. I have some big issues with the logic, like I thoroughly believe actually seeing thoughts all the time would cause insanity or make everyone non-verbal. However, I liked this as much as The Fifth Wave if not for how annoying the thought stuff was. There are plenty of worse movies out there than Chaos Walking. The list of less irritating movies is much shorter though.
Side Rant: What's the rule on rating box office failures post COVID? All movies since March 2020 have underperformed*. Even an absolute success like A Quiet Place: Part II made less than the first movie and would've made much more without shutdowns. Similarly, with only $13 million stateside after a Feb 2021, Chaos Walking is absolutely a box office disaster, but is it considered worse than The Host's $26 million in 2013? Hell, how does that compare to Monster Hunter only making $15 million two months earlier in Dec 2020? I need a shorthand for pandemic in/deflation, like saying a movie made "a COVID 20 mil".
*The War with Grandpa making $21 million in 2020 is the only movie I'll even hear as an argument, and even that I'm unconvinced about.
Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend
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