Have you ever experienced the feeling of bone crushing disappointment as your dreams shattered right in front of your eyes? No? Just me I guess.
The live adaption for this beloved dystopian trilogy *finally* hit the theatres this year, and that’s the final thing you can be relieved about before you book yourself in for around 2.5 hours of prickling disappointment, but I must admit this is only applicable to the people who’ve read the book in the long run. For those who choose to watch the movie because they are legitimately intrigued by the plot and the trailer seemed pretty cool, I envy you and your blissful obliviousness since it wasn’t a luxury I could’ve afforded. Anyways, let me begin by bombarding you with some arguably boring facts, as the protocol demands. The Chaos Walking trilogy by Patrick Ness began its ascent with the release of ‘The Knife of Never Letting Go’, the first book in the series back in 2008. Within the years the series has won a lot of children fiction awards in UK, even the Carnegie medal in 2011 for the third book of the series (‘Monsters of Men’). As many reports suggest that the adaption for the book has had been in production for many years and has undergone several rewrites since Lionsgate acquired its rights in 2011. It was originally supposed to release on 1st March 2019 but due to a lot of reasons that would take up a lot of my ranting space; I’ll not be indulging into them. The movie has an amazing cast to boast with Tom Holland (Todd Hewitt), Daisy Ridley (Viola Eade) and Mads Mikkelson (Mayor Prentiss) as the leads.
The story begins with Todd, a 12-year old boy (nearly 13) living in Prentisstown that is part of the new world. This apparently means that in future, our successors managed to find a planet that could support human civilization in its most basic needs and called it the “New world”. Although this *New* world had some *New* surprises in store for the first humans that first set foot on the planet, particularly nasty for all the men. You see, after coming on the planet everyone realized that all the men had their thoughts laid out bare for anyone in the form of what they called ‘the noise’; which basically means that anyone could hear what every guy was thinking, the courtesy even extended to animals but you know who it didn’t affect, the women. Something else affected them and it wasn’t good (duh).
Now Todd was just simply counting his days till he turned 13 and ‘became a man’ which has a whole different meaning in Prentisstown, which constitutes all of 146 men and no women, at all (yes things turned to that) Todd’s life changes in the most bizarre way possible when he came across… wait for it, Viola a girl! But okay who did not see that coming. After that it’s a story of trust, betrayal and love you know, all the best stuff. All in all, the three books are pure genius and go through many basic human issues like dictatorship, about how there are no good sides in a war and so on.
The movie on the other hand, is a whole different thing and it couldn’t even unpack like even 15% of the potential. Now I would swear furiously and trash it but I really don’t want to scare anyone away. In the least you can say that the movie was different in a lot of ways, and for the worse. With the best cast a fan could ever dream of, my expectations were Mount Kilimanjaro high and after watching the movie my spirits dropped down in the pits of Mariana Trench to say the least. If I could make a list of all the things went wrong; it would be a long list, so I’ll make the obvious shorter one, the two things that I liked about the movie: first, the way ‘the noise’ was visualized and second, the cast (it’s okay, you can say that I’m obsessed) and that’s about it.
But if you do it the other way round, it’s a difficult journey altogether. Picture it like that; I watch the movie because “Oh is that Tom Holland?” and then I’m thoroughly intrigued because that’s sort of a cool plot, and then I sit down to read the books then its intrigue X100, in all I’m a lot more impressed and a lot less disappointed. I mean all that wasted potential would still make me mad, but it wouldn’t be like a blow this time around. And for the people who are skeptical; you can try out the movie and if it doesn’t interest you, you can save yourself from going through three volumes, which would be a huge loss on your part but who am I to say.
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