Shadow in the Cloud (2020)
Every mission has its demons.
A new movie for a new year act 2, this time with a movie that actually released after the new year started! To be real with you, I used to watch a bunch of trailer collections to kind of keep up with movies and see what all looked interesting that was coming out. Lately though, I really haven’t been doing so - and of course with the whole stuff going on making theaters a less than optimal idea, a lot of any of the trailers I would watch were for things that were delayed for who knows how long anyways. On a whim I watched a trailer compilation the other night and happened to see tonight’s entry in there - one that just so happened to also be available for digital rental and purchase despite being it’s “theater run.” World War bombers and nasty monsters? Count me in, tonight we find a Shadow in the Cloud.
The trailer sold me - the description a bit less so. Perhaps it’s a cognitive disconnect, but when the description tells me it’s going to be a feminist adventure I have horror-flashbacks to that one Ghostbusters movie and how that was squandered away.Pleasantly for me however, this was quite subdued - in fact, it barely felt like that at all. Yeah, it touches on the classic era topics of discrimination through verbal banter and the likes, but it’s not actively trying to make all men look like monsters and instead feels like it’s just a believable little snippet of what could have been - well, until the more fantastical elements start up. Still, despite not being this unblemished angel herself, our leading lady can kick some butt and show some ingenuity that could impress on her adventure. Just what is that adventure you ask?
Well, here’s a review complication - I can’t really go into what the classified mission she’s on is in depth, because that spoils a bit of the movie - and I do my best to generally keep these mostly spoiler free. As the movie starts, despite showing us some shots that would allude to some mysterious questionable nature to what we are being told, is that a woman is on a classified mission to transport the contents of what looks to be a radio box to her destination, and she’s been put aboard a plane flying to Samoa with some hardware. This in a time of superstition, war, and let’s be honest - more open racism and sexism - provides some tensions between the crew of the bomber and our lead, and things start to get more intense from there. Enemy plains, a mysterious creature on the plane - and the secret of the box all await the viewer of this one.
Now, from the trailer I thought the monster was just some generic bat creature, but then (thanks to the reminder caused by the opening cartoon) I realized what it was supposed to be. The monster of this movie is a gremlin - not the furry cute until fed late kind, but a living representation of the old “my gear is falling apart and I don’t know why” kind. As far as it’s presented, it might have some mischievous nature in the things it does to hamper the plane’s performance, but it fells much more as though it’s simply a natural beast going about doing what it does. It helps ground it somewhat in the setting - and it might sound funny, but it’s not the most unbelievable thing about this movie. That really goes to one of the later effects, visible in a trailer when a person uses and explosion to turn their falling down into some flying up - and I mean literal person, not the plane. Look, it’s a bit dumb schlocky at times, but you don’t pitch me a movie about an old plane crew and a woman fist-fighting a gremlin and have me expect it to be this super-high brow artsy tear jerker of a movie. No, you pitch me that and I expect something I’d see on the SyFy channel with perhaps better acting and some form of budget.
Nice plane.
The other thing to note about the movie is that the front portion - maybe half, maybe two thirds of the movie - is pretty heavy on just dialogue tensions. Is it an enemy plane? Is it a monster? Is the plane going to fall apart? Man-banter about hot lady. Lady putting horny dudes in their place, but it being ineffective because they are horny dudes and horny dudes are pretty dumb. Thankfully, the acting is done pretty well by everyone on board - even if 90 percent of it at that point is just them over a radio. Like, it’s an odd movie - a whole lot of the time is spent with our lead in her little belly-gunner sphere with the other characters only existing via radio - except the glimpses or attacks from the monster or plane. Yet, I didn’t find myself really bored. Yes, I had to pause it here and then when I had to attend to something, but I’ve watched movies that actively made me bored and I had wanted to stop watching but just didn’t because I had nothing better to do and this wasn’t like that at all. Maybe it’s the fascinating use of the setting, maybe it’s the solid level of believability in the acting, or maybe it was just the mystery of whats in the box and the desire to see that monster that keeps getting teased - I had no problems wanting to keep watching.
The acting here is pretty good. There’s certainly a few times when it could have maybe been a little improved - some might argue a bit of it is over the top, especially from our lead, but I would argue that plays into the hammy nature of what I originally figured this thing was going to be. Some might argue that it’s offensive - but honestly, at no real point did I ever feel like it’s something that I couldn’t hear if I were just talking to a bunch of average dudes at some point. Language can be crude, and so can the people who use it - but it’s not a case of just dropping words for the sake of being offensive, even if that might be a characters intent. By the time things start really picking up, there’s also this nice shift in dynamics of the characters and you get to see this change in how everyone is presented - and that’s kind of neat, if not perhaps a little bit wasted. Despite that though, the movie does get real talky at times, so just be aware of that if you are heading in expecting a generic monster fight movie.
The effects are pretty good here as well, with some nice explosions and fires. The set department had some fun here, making plenty of little things that fall apart or break, little details like exposed gears and the likes. Effects also got to be brutal when they wanted to - a broken finger looking a bit painful - but nothing exceedingly rough. The worst of it is at some point you see a little bit of viscera sliding around, but the quantity of it is quite small and most the stuff you will be feasting your eyes on is just red stains on shirts and clothes. Camera work gets to have some fun as well, doing some tricky things like flipping the camera so it looks as though up is down when a character is traversing it, making me immediately think it’s how the scene was probably shot (as opposed to having the actor hanging off of something), but also doing a wonderful job of making things feel so weird somehow.
Where’s Waldo?
Maybe it’s not what you are looking for, maybe it is. When it came down to it, it gave me an entertaining movie with a good cast in a old bomber with some classy pinup art on it’s side. There was a monster, there was some action, and there was a mystery to the story that kept me interested long enough to get to the conclusion, all the while having a good time. There are some heavy parts in there, and some might not enjoy various aspects of it - some might get offended, some might get put off, some might just not like gremlins and spooked, who am I to really know? That said, I don’t feel bad about the purchase cost, and could see myself maybe watching it again later on as a nice background time killer. If nothing else, the out-of-place feeling synth music really caught my attention, and I could listen to the movie happily without any real complaints until it got to the more bombastic end scenes to peak the interest once again of my eyes.