Shadow in the Cloud – “Cheesy, yet in a perfectly entertaining way”

Okay, just suspend your disbelief at the door for director Roseanne Liang’s film Shadow in the Cloud starring the kickass (pun intended) Chloe Grace Moretz as the sole female passenger of a WWII military flight plane called “The Fool’s Errand” (foreshadowing much) with a very mysterious cargo to protect. If you, like myself, consider the most famous episode of ‘The Twilight Zone’ to be “Nightmare at 20,000 feet” then…you will love this take on the premise.

Right off the bat, Maude Garrett is greeted by her all-male flight crew with indignance and sexism…which she handles with eyes rolled. She is immediately shoved into a very cramped turret and the audience spends most of the first half of the film in there with her. It is stressful and claustrophobic.  Her facial expressions alone register to us everything that is happening.

Once she sees literal (and well produced CGI) gremlins sabotaging the plane, the game is on. She will protect her cargo at all costs, and her strong performance is convincing. The beginning of the film lets us know that “gremlins” may be a possibility on military missions.

Shadow in the Cloud is a well-made cuckoo-bananas B-Movie, that knows it is a cuckoo bananas B-Movie. It tackles issues of sexism, while still paying homage to the character of Ripley in Alien….released in 1979.  It ultimately does explain the MacGuffin of Garret’s cargo and pays homage to the women who served in the Air Force during WWII.

Shadow in the Cloud is carried by Moretz’s performance as well as the crisp pace and nonstop ridiculous action. It is a short film, knowingly cheesy yet in a perfectly entertaining way. Well worth a watch as it packs in a lot of content and #metoo commentary in under 90 minutes. I miss these types of movies.