“A female WWII pilot traveling with top secret documents on a B-17 Flying Fortress encounters an evil presence on board the flight.”
**Spoiler alert** Spoilers ahead**
Maude Garret (Chloe Grace Moretz) a female pilot who carries top secret information, boards a B17 bomber. Faced with a suspicious ‘all male crew’ who question her identity. Suddenly Maude spots a shadow in the clouds. Was it a Japanese fleet on patrol or something else more sinister?
Opening on an atmospheric setup, ‘Shadow in the cloud’ is a frustratingly silly movie that quickly deteriorates into unintentional hilarity.
Co-Written by Max Landis who allegedly sexually abused women, the opening salvo of obnoxious, predatory all male crew takes on a more sinister overtone than probably intended. Filled with gems such as ‘she has a face i’d like to fuck’ you get the general idea of the quality of the dialogue spoken here. It’s played for shock factor to a certain degree but when this continues for at least 15 minutes then you have to wonder wheter it is the only thing the writer actually has to say which is more than a little irritating.
For the first 40 minutes it is essentially a one women play. Self contained to a gun turret below the b17 bomber as Maude chats back and forth with her male counterparts. Besides the questionable dialogue exchanges it did have potential to make something claustrophobic and interesting. In the hands of a more skilled director we could have seen something different emerge. As it stands it feels laboured and forced in service of a creature that is only partially realised.
If you haven’t guessed it there is a gremlin on board the ship. Not that you needed to guess by the way, that is firmly rammed down your throat by an irrititating cartoon before the main film just in case you had a labotomy the week before and wouldn’t ‘get it’.
The other bizarre choice is how the crew is visualised when they talk to Maude. Stylised cutaways highlighted in red and green and a black background. This totally took me out of the movie and for no reason whatsoever other than to be ‘stylistic’.
But I digress the creature is for the most part well done. A hybrid rat/bat which terrorises Maude and the crew. The obvious comparison (And clearly copied) here is the episode of the twilight zone ‘nightmare at 10,000 feet’ which does a better job at creating a chaotic and suspenseful atmosphere. In this movie it seems as though suspense is an afterthought in service of trying to make something look cool.
Soon we realise that the package that Maude was carrying is, in fact, a baby and the father is one of the crew members on board trying to sequester her to a new country. No sooner has the creature invaded the bomber and he has taken the baby hostage.
Cue all sorts of death defying antics that literally make no sense physics wise to rescue her baby:
Maude climbing underneath the belly of the bomber with a broken finger as the bomber speeds hundreds of miles an hour.
Maude falls from the bomber hurtling through the sky to her death only to be blown back up into the plane by an explosion.
Flying the bomber upside down to supposedly land correctly with only two functioning engines.
The list goes on and on..
By the time the finale swings around (besides the glaring fact that it makes no sense whatsoever as the creature hurtled to the ground miles away) it is a mano el mano fight to the death between the creature and Maude who suddenly has learned martial arts on her exit of the plane. She litterally beats the living shit out of the creature, pummeling it in the face, ending with a death strike using the creatures own claw as a weapon.
If the blatant over the top in your face feminism up to this point wasn’t enough then the last shot of Maude breast feeding her baby will surely tip you over the edge. My wife turned to me at that point and said to me “ God, that was a terrible movie, wasn’t it?” “Yes, yes it was” I replied.