Shadow in the Cloud
The Twilight Zone (Nightmare at 20 Thousand Feet) meets Ice Age meets Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot.
The way this starts, I was expecting a monologue, like Locke, or The Desperate Hour. When our protagonist gets locked in the turret, I thought that was it. But the final third really subverts your expectations.
Back to basics: our protagonist is a WASP, a combat auxiliary version of Rosie the Riveter. There was a true shortage of people, if woman were being brought to the battlefield, and this is shown by the positively archaic way she is treated by the soldiers.
You can say she bursts on the plane in a very unorthodox way, brandishing some papers and carrying a big case, in the middle of takeoff. She is begrudgingly accepted, but stuffed on the lower swivelling machine gun turret. After suffering a torrent of verbal abuse and sniggering at her words, even when pulling rank, they are attacked by a Japanese plane and she shoots it down. This makes the guys respect her somehow, stop seeing her as a Dame.
By the time she out of the turret, it’s almost the end of the film: she is outed as an impostor, the package she carries is her baby with one of the guys on the plane, and the Nips are tearing a lot of holes on the plane. Oh, and since the writer saw The Twilight Zone, there’s some kind of “gremlin” wrecking the plane engines, a physical monster she fights and shoots.
The main reason she leaves the turret is to stop the baby from falling to the ground, she needs to monkey around the underside of the plane. She does it, retrieves the baby, then doubles back and gets in the regular plane location. Pretty much all other dudes get killed by Nips, but she shoots them all down, then helps the copilot to land the plane. That was a nice landing, they all survived it.
Only the copilot and another soldier reach the ground intact, besides her and the baby’s father. As he regrets having abandoned her, the baby is snatched again by the gremlin, but she goes full momma bear and tears that monster apart with her bare hands.
Finally, as they wait for rescue, the baby needs to eat, so she breastfeeds the baby with the injured breast and all, the baby must be drinking blood. Looking directly to the camera, roll credits.
This is a very surprising film, it’s certainly something you don’t see every day. Chloë Moretz can certainly carry the film on her performance, and she practically does. Speaking of aircraft crashes (cough), Max Landis is credited with writing this, it seems he did not need so much research to write the whole verbal abuse towards ladies.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.