Shadow In The Cloud

 This review may contain spoilers!

 

Shadow In The Cloud takes place during World War II and follows Flight Officer Maude Garrett as she transports a confidential package aboard a B-17 Flying Fortress, oblivious to the supernatural threat that awaits her onboard. I really liked the atmosphere constructed in this feature, there was this style that felt like looking at the era through a new-age retro filter. We've seen this before in films like Overlord or video games like Wolfenstein; but this managed a discordant and hostile environment while embracing the otherworldly and bizarre through the score and colour palette. The score itself is a big aspect of the feature's success, capturing this synthetic sound that left you both filled with wonder and ill at ease.

 

Byron Coll, who played Terrence Taggart, was one of the truly believable antagonistic crew performances in the film; Coll had this gruff outrage at having to accept Moretz on his ship that translated well to lingering contempt over the duration of the narrative.

However, the best performance came from Chloe Grace Moretz, who played Maude Garrett. One of the best qualities of this film was hos much room it gave Moretz to just play the role, really navigate a number of scenes and play through a spectrum of emotions. When first we meet Maude she's a very tense woman, fraught with anxiety about something unknown and bristling at her poor treatment by the crew of The Fool's Errand. Yet as the film goes along you get to watch Moretz sternly reprimand the men she is stuck in transit with, affirming her rank and experience in combat. She also has this warm, compassionate side when she talks to them of their time back home as well as her own experiences outside of duty. You come to understand Maude as a role who has been cast as a victim once, but who rejected that and left to become a soldier. The entire feature is held aloft by watching as Moretz turns this naarative from one of a woman fleeing to a woman fighting for her life and that of all she holds dear in a completely effective and ruthless manner.

Shadow In The Cloud is a wonderful notion of a film but it is nothing short of the dark side of B-grade blockbuster films. The entire feature handles Maude being trapped in the gunner turret for an hour of the film more as a novelty than a plot device, because it doesn't stick with this element. She navigates dialogue almost continuously until the film is ready to engage with more intensive action. In fact having so much of the film set in this one environment feels like it serves little to no purpose. A number of the dialogue exchanges grow repetitive or just hold a lot of empty dialogue; the feature has sic exchanges around the co-pilot being coloured, the same repeated sexist remarks about Maude being a female military personnel member and a lot of empty posturing around whether or not the crew will open Maude's secret package. The film simply doesn't have enough substance to track its runtime, which is a major concern when the feature doesn't even crest 90 minutes. Watching the gremlin creature being pitched as some sort of supernatural antagonist felt like a tacked on idea to make the stakes higher. In all seriousness the gremlin never had much narrative impact and it didn't even kill as many characters as the Japanese fighter pilots did. Making this film supernatural at all was a strange choice that never came across as justified, serving to take away from the film rather than contribute. The cinematography became exceedingly dull to watch, with the same five turret shots becoming pretty obsolete after ten minutes and the transition to action a weak effort at best. The special effects for the film were more than the designers could clearly handle; the backdrop when Maude climbed the exterior of the plane looked ghastly and the gremlin wasn't a very appealing design.

Nick Robinson, Beulah Koale, Callan Mulvey, Benedict Wall and Joe Witkowski, who played Stu Beckell, Anton Williams, John Reeves, Tommy Dorn and Bradley Finch respectively, were little more than glorified extras or walking corpses to be in this film; a lot of these performances blasted out dialogue in the same manner and gave little effort to differentiate from one another. Taylor John Smith, who played Walter Quaid, wasn't very convincing as the former love interest to Moretz; his more brooding yet soft-spoken exterior was quite a jarring contrast to the ensemble he was acting against.

Chloe Grace Moretz gives her all to a film that shows little promise and fails to execute even that much. I would give Shadow In The Cloud a 2/10.