[TIFF 2020] REVIEW: ‘Shadow in the Cloud’ is a wartime horror with a troubled origin
Chloë Grace Moretz stars in Shadow in the Cloud, directed by Roseanne Liang.
On many fronts, Shadow in the Cloud should be seen as a trim, creative movie that puts a focus on female leadership. It’s directed and co-written by Roseanne Liang, a Chinese-New Zealand filmmaker, and centres on a female Second World War pilot (Chloë Grace Moretz) carving out a place on a flight crewed by mostly misogynistic airmen.
But there’s another name on the “written by” credits card: Max Landis. I didn’t know about Landis’s involvement when I picked up a ticket for the movie at this year’s TIFF, and it was only through a random tweet from entertainment reporter Maude Garrett (illuminating the origin of the lead character’s name) that I went into the digital screening looking for Landis’s fingerprints.
Though I once admired the screenwriter’s work based on the sleeper hit Chronicle and a video essay on Superman, Landis has steadfastly insisted on torching any good will he might have once had. Accusations of sexual assault and emotional abuse from eight women were made public last year. Landis’s creative output has also taken a dive. While the industry has been happy to produce his screenplays, titles like Bright suggest that at best, Landis’s skill is in writing the sort of sardonic genre remixes that producers think the kids will like.
It’s hard to know the timeline here - when was Landis’s last draft, and was it submitted before or after the reports about him came to light? I can’t definitively say to what degree Landis’s public shaming affected the writing process for Shadow in the Cloud, and how much rewriting Liang did before finishing the film. But the movie can still be read, unfortunately, as Landis’s clumsy, reflexive response to abuse allegations - real or anticipated. Liang, Moretz and company try to make it their own, but your enjoyment of the movie may hinge on how much you know going in.
Moretz plays Garrett (Landis literally just used the real Garrett’s name), a member of the Royal Air Force Women’s Auxiliary, which during the war would ferry warplanes between bases, often with no weapons and in poor condition. She’s carrying a mysterious object in a leather satchel, and gives the all-male crew of a B-17 a written order that says the package is top secret, to be transported to an airbase on American Samoa with no questions asked.
Unfortunately for Garrett, she picked a bad plane. Most of the men onboard are instantly suspicious, and subject her to a torrent of abuse, begrudgingly agreeing to bring her along - but only if she rides in the ramshackle gun turret in the plane’s belly. While down there, much of the movie’s dialogue happens over the radio, and the camera doesn’t leave that one cramped location for a big chunk of the runtime. It’s up to Moretz to carry the whole movie, which she does without breaking a sweat.
Garrett’s troubles increase with the arrival of two enemies: the Japanese air force, and a thoroughly supernatural addition, a gremlin. Yes, perhaps I forgot to mention: Shadow in the Cloud is also a creature feature. In an homage to the 1963 Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”, starring William Shatner, Garrett is plagued by a bat/monkey-like creature that’s trying to tear the plane apart in mid-air.
You can probably expect some of the drama that follows: not only does the crew of Garrett’s flight disbelieve her report of Japanese planes, but many of them quickly reject the notion of a slavering, methodically destructive beast. The movie spends a bit of time questioning Garrett’s own perception - especially once some details from her past emerge - but soon the screenplay moves into full-on action mode.
It’s at that point that I detected some of Landis’s influence. The movie takes pains to show Garrett as a hyper-capable airwoman, downing multiple Japanese Zeros with machine guns, rewiring the turret so the men can’t take it over, etc. This is all in spite of the fact that women didn’t fly combat missions during the war (which the script points out several times). Meanwhile, almost all the leering, abusive male characters are systematically killed, either by enemy fire or the gremlin, as if Landis is “unselfishly” executing bad men for being bad. Later, Garrett is also revealed to be a hand-to-hand combat expert, who then triumphantly pivots to perform one of the most feminine of acts as the credits begin to roll.
There’s a creepy placement of Garrett on an impossibly high pedestal in this movie, something I doubt Liang and Moretz would have included if the script had originated with them. It smacks of some of Landis’s reported behaviour, where he would smother women with praise in an effort to sound like a feminist, only to victimize them when it suited him.
Now, you can choose to see Moretz’s character as nothing less than a female Tom Cruise in this movie, clinging to the outside of a plane and kicking more ass than anyone else. It’s up to you to determine just how progressive the movie really is. Perhaps if viewed separately from the co-screenwriter’s personal life, the movie’s other charms, like its confident visuals and Moretz’s performance, stand in higher relief. But a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and I find it hard not to identify what Landis used this movie to do. Maybe the best tactic is this: revel in the fact that Liang and Moretz made a fun, female-led, sometimes implausible adventure out of a screenplay that had other impulses. Sometimes you have to renovate things instead of burning them down.
Shadow in the Cloud gets two and a half stars out of four.
Stray thoughts
The movie opens with an animated propaganda short that had to be an homage to Fallout game series’ Vault Boy animations.
Keeping the first half of the movie inside the gun turret was a clever way to keep the budget down - here’s hoping that was Liang’s idea.
A bit more folklore/backstory about the gremlin would have been nice.