I already mentioned in the past how much I’m a fan of Chloë Grace Moretz but that her resume of movies hasn’t exactly been the smoothest; last film I saw of hers, “Greta”, had potential but was mildly disappointing. “Shadow In The Cloud”, though? Yeah, I’d suppose this is how you start off the year: One part WWII drama, one part actionfest, one part feminist social commentary and all parts, equally entertaining.....but also equally confusing and inconsistent.
Props to Rosanne for directing something that obviously has a lot of ambition and behind it, especially with Max Landis (who wrote Chronicle and Bright) as co-writer. Needless to say, the camaraderie between them created a project that never managed to bore me. It’s a B-kind of shlock horror that delivers less on horror and more on the mechanics of this world being very comic-book worthy and the acting mostly supports that. Chloë Grace Moretz once again never fails to impress me, the films biggest twist did succeed in shocking me and elevating the stakes slightly and unlike such projects like Battlefield 5, this film spends a vast majority of its time focusing on being alternate universe historical fiction and so, it spends a vast majority of its time subtlety reminding of you of such but it doesn’t get very upfront about that fact until literally the films finale. Not to mention because of the writing that the movie plays on, the characters begin to become more and more cartoonish, the message of the film, while positive, is both done to death and becomes increasingly ham-fisted, I’m conflicted as all hell with the musical score and the tone makes a completely incredulous 180 multiple times and never recovers.
I think you can catch on with what I’m trying to say here: not all of the ingredients blended together but what was presented was still enjoyable for what it was. Given what’s ALREADY going down these first seven days, guess we needed this kind of flawed escapism.
