The weirdest big screen ride in ages with an awful lot of Chloe Grace Moretz and very little Drazic.

I’m betting it now – this is the weirdest film that will come to the big screen in 2021.  People are telling me it’s too early to make that kind of call, but I disagree.  If something comes out weirder than this, I will be totally stoked. So I make this call as a challenge… 2021 bring me your weird-arse films!

The next thing I’ll say is this film feels like a great metaphor for the experiences of a lot of people in 2020, the year of Corona lockdowns and crazy.  There is always some new challenge or drama being sprung on you when you least expect it, despite the fact you’re mostly contained in one space.  And in one space is most of this film – it’s an up close claustrophobic plane setting.

Chloe Grace Moretz (Kick Ass, The 5th Wave, Greta) plays Maude, a female pilot with a top secret mission sent aboard a WW2 plane full of men known as The Fool’s Errand.  She doesn’t hit a glass ceiling as such, but is instead trapped in a glass ball that hangs below the plane and sticks out like the proverbial.  

A large amount of the film takes place here and feels a lot like a radio play – we just see Maude’s face and hear the voices of the men onboard through her headphones.  They did do a reasonable job at casting a range of accents here, and while I couldn’t have told you who was speaking when, I at least knew it was a different guy.  

Speaking of accents, apparently Maude’s changes part way through the film, but in true bad-listening style I didn’t even notice and wondered what all the fuss was about.  But you’ll need to enjoy CGM’s face because you will be spending an awful lot of time looking at it.  For most of the film the men are heard but not seen.  CGM is the action hero and she is a glory to behold as she punches, shoots, climbs and screams her way through – physics be damned!

Whilst trapped in her glass-ball gun turret, Maude starts to see things, from enemy fighter planes to weird beasts on the wings.  Naturally she’s not believed by the men, who are too busy talking to each other about how much they’d like to get it on with the broad/dame/whore in their plane.  Battles with planes and beasts ensue.  Crazy aerobatic action sequences ensue.  The beasts are particularly well animated and as a biology lover I found them delightfully believable.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the suspense is the top-secret bag Maude has brought aboard.  It is interesting in that when its contents are finally revealed the stakes feel like they drop momentarily, give you the wtf, and then amp back up with a motherfucking vengeance.  It feels like it flips from “what’s in it” to “omg when will” in moments.  Protecting the bag becomes the key drama as the battles with beasts and planes and aircraft damage continues.

Some will say this is a film with an identity crisis, but I’d lean into “wild mash up.”  It’s a B-grade monster movie, a war film that shows the shittier side of the attitudes of the era, a feminist kick-arse film and a radio-play drama.  And it’s impressive that these things all fit in a short 83 minute run time.  It has more slower sections than the trailer implies, but is actiony when it wants to be.

Bookended with a infotainment airforce cartoon at the start, and real footage of WW2 era airforce women at the end, this film actually creates a near-perfect bridge between those two tones.  It’s always hard to know how much impact a female writer-director (Roseanne Liang) has on a film with a male writer (Max Landis).  But I have never, ever seen an ending with such a scene of quiet female strength and I imagine it could be quite some time before I see a similar ending on screen.  It is not an ending that everyone will have a frame of reference for and may consequently unsettle many who are unsure of what it is meant to mean.

This is by no means a perfect film.  But it also does what it’s doing with such balls-to-the-wall commitment that I can’t help but applaud its bonkers effort.

J* gives it 4 stars.

PS.  I can now confirm that Chloe Grace Moretz does not punch a bat.

PPS.  For what it’s worth, this is a New Zealand made film set in airspace between New Zealand and Samoa.  Callan Mulvey aka Drazic is in it, but don’t expect to see much of him.

PPPS.  Trying to gauge tone?  You’re looking at notes here from Overlord (2018), Sky Captain… (2004) and maybe Sucker Punch (2011).  With maybe some of devil-may-care sensibilities from Iron Sky (2012).