By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 5 cats
Director: Roseanne Liang
Starring: Benedict Wall | Beulah Koale | Callan Mulvey | Chloë Grace Moretz | Nick Robinson | Taylor John Smith
Country: new_zealand, united_states
Year: 2021
Running time: 83
IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9691136/reference
Jeff says: “My 10-year-old Mom could have watched SHADOW IN THE CLOUD serialized on the screen at the Billings movie theater where she spent many of her Saturday afternoons. The cliffhangers, the edge-of-the-seat thrills, the non-stop action, the heroism and valor, they’re all there like they’d time jumped from 1944. I don’t think I’ve seen a more perfect popcorn B-movie since ALIENS.
“It’s 1943, and a woman shows up at an Auckland airbase with papers to prove she is allowed passage on the B-28 bomber that’s just about to begin its run. She has a cut on her cheek, one arm in a sling, and a mysterious satchel under the other one. The male crew gets its back up, but they have their orders, and she comes aboard. For her ‘safety’, they propose caging her in the bubble turret slung from the belly of the airplane. There’s not room for her satchel down there, and she balks at being without it; it’s the most important thing she carries, she protests. A chivalrous sergeant steps up and promises to keep it safe. She relents but makes him pledge never to open it. She clambers into the turret, and we spend the next 40 minutes of the movie crammed in there with her as the story renders her situation ever more desperate (including overhearing, on the intercom, the crew’s leering sexism, while their resentful treatment of her literally risks her life). Eventually she does bust out, metaphor for her metamorphosis into full-blown warrior.
“Chloë Grace Moretz is astonishing, channeling Ripley the whole time and giving her a good run for the money, a gritty, working-class, action hero with boundless determination and ferocity. She means and proves it when she says nobody knows how far she’ll go to do what needs doing.
“The script is a fizzing bag of tricks lending each turn in the story, each escape from terror more astounding and more audacious than the last one, with no time to consider how outlandish they become, they come so fast, and the last one, the most audacious of all.
“I would not usually propose that a purely escapist piece like this be given serious consideration by the nominating committee, but for its relentlessly feminist take and a script that leaves homage spinning on its tail in the dust wondering what hit it, that literally defines the genre, I find it worthy. On its own terms, I give it 5 cats.”