Shadow in the Cloud (2020)

Warning: I’m going to spoil one of the very last scenes, because only a saint could not!

It looks like just another mission of mortal danger for the crew of a B-17 during World War II. However, once a last minute guest calling herself Maude Garrett (Chloë Grace Moretz), coming complete with a British accent and carrying a mysterious package, arrives, things become rather wild, and not just because all the men on board a rampant misogynists whose mouths most guys I know would probably apply bleach to. Our somewhat mysterious protagonist is accidentally locked into a gun emplacement for a while, where she discovers the plane isn’t just in danger from Japanese airplanes, but also from an actual, plane-munching Gremlin.

After that, a series of increasingly idiotic plot twists begins, heroic action heroine deeds are committed, and nothing makes much sense.

For its first fifteen minutes or so, Roseanne Liang’s Shadow in the Cloud actually seems to be a neatly filmed, low-scale tale of individual horror, but things soon explode into a series of plot twists so increasingly outlandish, nobody involved can have meant most of the script seriously. It’s Liang’s own fault too, for she co-wrote with the never subtle and usually underwhelming Max Landis.

So it’s really important to go into this one with the right mind-set, perhaps a little (or a lot) drunk, accepting this as the kind of preposterous low budget action movie with horror elements it’s clearly meant to be. Once I got into the proper mindset (and had recovered from the whiplash), I actually rather enjoyed myself a lot here. Liang uses her series of improbable but neatly conceived set pieces in combination with middling special effects for the kind of loud and kinetic effect you know and love (or if you’re one of those people, loathe), from things like the Fast and Furious films. The film’s really hitting the spot for preposterous nonsense action.

Moretz seems to enjoy playing the improbable badass a lot, too, throwing herself into the job physically, while always pretending the emotional beats make any actual sense (they don’t). If ever everything unfortunate happens to that woman’s mainstream movie career, she’ll have no problem dominating direct to home video action movies.

Shadow in the Cloud also is an explicitly feminist movie, in a way that doesn’t work well as any kind of reasonable argument for equality (which would be absurd in the context of the plot), but is really a series of “fuck yeah, women” asides that are at once deeply silly and deeply likeable, perfectly keeping in the action movie tradition the director is working in. So this is indeed a film in which what amounts to the male main character (calling him a “lead” would really go much too far) spends most of his on-screen time doing little except for holding a baby (don’t ask) while the female lead (or really, only actual lead character that isn’t a gremlin) gets to do all the cool stuff.

This all culminates in a climax in which Moretz has an escalating melee fight with the (bad) CGI gremlin, and, after winning, swaggers towards the surviving cast, and proceeds to grab the baby and breastfeed it on screen. You really got to see it to believe it, but if you’re like me, that’s the sort of absurd directorial posturing you’ll actually enjoy seeing.

As any kind of argument for feminism, this sort of stuff (and really anything else the film has to say about the matter) is of course completely useless, and probably counter-productive towards convincing the needlessly serious who somehow still haven’t been convinced. Fortunately, I don’t believe the film is trying to make some serious argument meant to convince anybody of the merits of feminism. There should, after all, really be no need for any convincing there anymore, that train having taken everyone on board worth talking to already, one suspects, and so Shadow in the Cloud proceeds to let is action heroine do what the male versions of that type have done for decades: do preposterous, fun things in an absurd yet awesome manner.