“Shadow in the Cloud” can’t figure out what kind of movie it wants to be, but if you’re in the mood for it, it succeeds at being simply out of control.
Chloe Grace Moretz plays Maude Garrett, a World War II officer who boards a B-17 bomber with orders for the all-male crew to take her and her mysterious package with them. The crew obliges but are sexist, vulgar and all around awful to her.
They stow her away in the plane’s underside ball turret, where she spends a long chunk of the movie. The writing misses an opportunity to build claustrophobia and tension while stuck in the glass ball, but it’s there that she sees (queue ‘The Twilight Zone’ music) something on the wing. It’s a gremlin, which was spoiled by an old military training cartoon that starts the movie.
From this point on, nothing in the movie makes sense, nor tries to. If you’re okay with that, you may enjoy the wild ride. She doesn’t tell the crew about the gremlin she just watched tear pieces off the plane and enter the wing. She seems to forget about it completely as she tells her cliché sob story to the crew. No biggie, I guess? Slowly, her lies and terrible British accent start to fall apart.
That’s when all hell breaks loose. A Japanese fighter plane shows up, and Maude blasts it out of the sky. The suspicious crew opens her mystery package for a surprising reveal, the gremlin gets inside the plane, and we’re off to new levels of silly.
The gremlin is clearly there with one mission: to steal the contents of her bag. We don’t know why, because this is not a movie concerned with answering any questions. While giving chase to the gremlin, Maude goes full American Ninja Warrior on the belly of the plane thousands of feet in the air at 250 miles per hour while enemy planes fire her way. It’s extreme monkey bars for like five minutes.
I kept laughing, not because this movie is a comedy, but because it’s so ridiculous. Director Roseanne Liang has created a glorified B-movie, but to her credit, she owns it. I kept wondering if the whole thing was going to symbolize something. It was too crazy not to have some deeper message. A gremlin was defined as a fictional creature that causes otherwise inexplicable malfunctions in aircraft. Did the gremlin stand for her personal life falling apart? Was it trying to take away what mattered most to her? Did she need to squash her inner turmoil before it took everything from her?
Nah, probably not. It’s a stretch to find something meaningful here. It’s more likely that it was just a crazy action story because it’s fun to watch. It was a short break from the overly serious world around us, but it offers little else, and I’ll forget about it by the time this prints.
2/5
“Shadow in the Cloud” is in theaters and available early release on demand now.
