No idea is too stupid for “Shadow in the Cloud”, Roseanne Liang’s totally crazy movie, and that’s the best thing about it. The worst, too.
Look, I like confusing movies as much as anyone. Maybe more. As long as they are carried out with some security, a difficult balance to find to take the story seriously, even when you are blowing the rules out the window.
Or cockpit. Most of the film (★★★ ½ in five; rated R; in theaters and streaming Friday on Apple TV, Voodoo and FandangoNOW) takes place in a B-17 bomber during World War II. But eventually it goes too far, even in the context of the story you’re telling. This does not affect the performance of Chloë Grace Moretz, around which the film is structured. She’s very good, making it unbelievable … OK, unbelievable. But palatable.
And it’s never less than fun on the edge of your chair.
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Moretz plays Maude Garrett, a woman in a flight suit who speaks her way to the plane, sporting an arm in a sling and a black eye with orders to transport a secret package. The all-male team – an absurdly chauvinistic team, insulting to the point of abuse – does not exactly receive her presence.
But she has orders signed by a major that no one wants to cross, so they place her in a tower below while continuing to make obscene sexual comments about her while she listens on the radio.
Garrett is difficult, however. She has clearly dealt with this sort of thing before. She only cares about the security of the package.
So things get weird. As we knew they would.
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Liang begins the film with an animated Allied Air Force training short about gremlins, the monsters that torment planes (and, the drawing insists, are just an excuse for crew mistakes).
What if the gremlins were real? If you’ve seen the famous “Twilight Zone” episode, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”, you know that this is not the first script to ask this question, or to answer it. The toxic idiots of the crew already think that Garrett is crazy, so when she starts to see not only Japanese fighter planes, but also a gremlin on the plane’s wing, they act with predictable imbecility. But now it is no longer just toxic ignorance that she is fighting.
Of course, she is right. And, as a less backward crew member (Taylor John Smith) says, she is more aviator than any of them will ever be.
This is not a spoiler. Most of the film involves Garrett battling one thing or another, whether it’s shooting down planes or driving away gremlins or risking his life to keep the secret package safe. “You have no idea how far I’ll go” to keep you safe, she yells at the gremlin at one point, and she’s not kidding.
Moretz is good at all of this. A long stretch of the film is just her sitting in the tower, talking to the team as they abuse her, stabbing to make sure the package is not damaged. It’s kind of like a mini version of Tom Hardy in “Locke”, when Hardy spends the entire movie driving a car, the camera basically focused on him all the time. It’s an incredible performance.
So, in its own way, it’s Moretz’s, but this is a different type of film. Still, she has to keep our attention from weakening, and she does.
Eventually, battles overflow from the fantastic to the silly. You have to be willing to go along with the trip to a certain extent to last up to five minutes of a film like this. Even if you are, there are some real droppers that threaten to get you out of the film completely.
Fortunately, Moretz is there to bring you back. She can’t do the sublime stupid, but in “Shadow in the Cloud”, she at least does something that is worth pursuing.
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This article originally appeared in Arizona Republic: review of ‘Shadow in the Cloud’: Chloë Grace Moretz’s World War II film is crazy