TIFF20: Shadow in the Cloud
Spoiler warning: In the review, I discuss some plot details, which are revealed early in the film, but may ruin the surprise if you are coming to this movie totally cold and are slow to catch on to movie and genre references.
If writer-director Roseanne Liang had wanted to make a girl-power version of a cheesy macho action movie, then mission accomplished. Although it premiered at TIFF 2020, there are already reviews lauding Shadow in the Cloud as a feminist B-movie blast. But, for me at least, it was disappointing to see a first-rate premise with a stormy atmosphere generating genuine tension and crackling ideas devolve into a second-rate Snakes on a Plane.
The premise is solid on paper, and it’s what hooked me into renting the film as part of TIFF 2020’s digital festival. The synthy Carpenter-esque score by Mahuia Bridgman-Cooper and a neon title card against a dark and foggy airfield marks an opening sequence firing on all cylinders. We see Maude Garrett (Chloë Grace Moretz) getting ready, with a broken arm in a sling, carrying a mysterious package in a box-shaped shoulder bag. Under hurried circumstances, she boards the Allied B-17 Flying Fortress before it takes off an Auckland airbase. The contents of the bag are “top secret,” she informs the crew.
These early portions of the movie set up a tantalizing, claustrophobic WWII bomber thriller with distinct feminist overtones. This is good stuff. (It’s intriguing to speculate which portions were in the original Max Landis script, and which Liang added during the rewrite meant to distance the project from Landis after allegations against him of sexual misconduct.) A genre mash-up, Shadow in the Cloud transposes the basic concept of “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” (both the famous 1963 episode of The Twilight Zone starring William Shatner, as well as George Miller’s incredible sequence from 1983’s Twilight Zone: The Movie) to WWII. The script also contains allusions to Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley character from the Alien series and bomber dramas, such as Memphis Belle (1990), among other films. Yet, Shadow in the Cloud begins to make some missteps even in these early moments.
As soon as Garrett steps onto the bomber, the male crew is at her throat, verbally and even physically. Chauvinistic male animosity to her presence on the bomber is only depicted in the most heightened, cartoonish manner. No scorn for her presence is allowed to simmer. The sexual harassment and misogynistic comments are all one-note and quickly boiling over! One Scottish airman seems to want to slit her throat; I guess he thought he was playing a surly, savage pirate mate. One crewmember, Staff Sgt. Walter Quaid (Taylor John Smith), is civil and defends her, clearly signalling to the audience, “Here’s a good guy who will become important later!” Another airman, the co-pilot (Beulah Koale), is virtually silent until becoming another good guy in the last act.
The rationale for the flight mission is unclear (maybe purposefully) as well as unconvincing. They are not going on a bombing raid but rather some sort of relocation flight. But if this is supposed to be a safer flight to another airbase, I don’t understand the constantly on-edge emotions of the crew from the get-go. With the crew’s hostilities and without a seat for Garrett in the main cabin (I’m not sure why a bomber would be carrying passengers), she is soon confined to the bomber’s belly gun. If they doubt her abilities, it’s strange to place her in a crucial gunner position. Here and elsewhere, the plotting and character behaviours don’t harmonize.
However, the film’s best sequence—whatever the rationale for the setup—takes place in this confined yet exposed setting. For about forty minutes of the movie, we see only Garrett, the camera remaining inside the belly-gun that hangs precariously above the clouds. She will face off against the hostile male voices of the aircrew over the internal radio, the threat of Japanese fighters in the clouds, as well as more sinister foes. But the virtuoso potential of such a sequence is somewhat diminished by Liang using a device Greta Gerwing uses to better effect in Little Women: having an absent character read a letter, or in this case radio dialogue, while staring directly into the camera. Liang shoots each male crewmember against a black backdrop. It’s a neat visual trick, but it also exposes the weak character construction of the crew, that we need visual reminders of who they are.
The film’s undemonstrated faith that Garrett always knows best also diminishes the dramatic potential of the situation. In both versions of “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” the emotional effect of the scenario involves the protagonist questioning his own sanity. The stonewalling behaviour of those around a person and their failure to take note can drive one crazy, and the feminist themes of the film could have easily explored this dimension. Indeed, gaslighting is a common trope in feminist art. Instead, Garrett seems pretty on-top of things the whole time. She’s annoyed they won’t listen, but although she might appear discouraged at times we never really believe that Garrett is going to lose her grip on reality. Her emotions remain constant and are written one-dimensionally.
Moretz does a fine job throughout Shadow in the Cloud, and in this sequence in particular, but the claim in some early reviews and promotional material that Moretz’s Garrett is a new Ellen Ripley is just not true. If you rewatch the first two Alien movies, Ripley is never a cheesy action heroine. She’s firm, calm, reasonable and intelligent, not just “kick-ass,” which seems to be Garrett’s main quality as the film develops, and the characteristic too many critics are looking for in every female character. Ripley’s true heroism is her unwavering courage and iron resolve, not her use of a flame-thrower. It’s not that Moretz’s Garrett doesn’t display aspects of these finer qualities; it’s that Liang’s focus is on Garrett using her courage and resolve to climb along the bottom of the B-17. If you don’t see the difference, I don’t know what to say. Importantly, the reason why Garrett will take this risk is the film’s biggest misstep, but I’ll leave you to find out why.
Liang also chooses to avoid the Spielbergian pattern of building suspense, as executed so successfully in Jaws and Jurassic Park, instead quickling moving to reveal the existence and features of the gremlin. At least Weta Digital does an excellent job of rendering the creature.
I’m not giving anything away by saying there is in fact a gremlin on the plane. The film opens with an attempt at a wartime-era cartoon warning pilots and flight crews to take responsibility and not blame mishaps on superstitious nonsense about mischievous gremlins, which was real folklore among the RAF in the early twentieth-century. The nature of such exposition in movies clues us in immediately that a gremlin will indeed show up. Thematically, the cartoon suggests that male abnegation of responsibility will be a dominant theme. In fact, I think you could argue that the gremlin functions as a metaphor for male irresponsibility in the film. The cartoon’s useful as a piece of historical exposition, but even the style of animation used is just off enough to suggest that the filmmakers themselves are operating off of only a vague impression of the past rather than deep historical research. I just don’t buy this movie as a period piece.
A skewed vision of the past comes across in all the encounters between the characters. Male chauvinism and even misogyny towards Garrett is believable. What’s not believable is the constant exaggerated delivery of it, as well as the total lack of military discipline onboard the aircraft, such that crewmembers are continually on the radio shouting and arguing, and even physically attacking each other at points in the film. It’s the extreme behaviour we usually expect high-stakes situations to draw out of characters, not be omnipresent features.
It’s these sorts of elements that suggest this isn’t simply a case of forwarding legitimately intelligent observations on gender politics under the cover of cheesy action and fun gremlin scares. This is a cartoonish fever dream of the most simplistic feminist stereotypes through and through. Maybe that’s the point. The film asks the viewer to suspend disbelief on all fronts, in its characters, its plotting, its air battles, and its horror creatures. I thought it was too much.
The fact that Shadow in the Cloud won TIFF 2020’s Midnight Madness prize means that my view is perhaps not the dominant one. Or that the levels of criticism and art appreciation have descended such that we confuse, and regularly choose, cartoons over reality.
4 out of 10
Shadow in the Cloud (2020, New Zealand)
Directed by Roseanne Liang; written by Roseanne Liang and Max Landis; starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Nick Robinson, Beulah Koale, Taylor John Smith, Callan Mulvey, Benedict Wall, Joe Witkowski, and Byron Coll.