Chaos Walking is a 2021 American dystopian action film directed by Doug Liman from a screenplay by Patrick Ness and Christopher Ford. It is based on Ness’s science fiction trilogy Chaos Walking, adapting its first book, 2008’s The Knife of Never Letting Go. It stars Daisy Ridley, Tom Holland, Mads Mikkelsen, Demián Bichir, Cynthia Erivo, Nick Jonas, and David Oyelowo. It follows a young man (Holland) who lives in a dystopian world without women, where all living creatures can hear each other’s thoughts in streams of images, words, and sounds called “Noise”. When a woman (Ridley) crash-lands on the planet, he must help her escape danger.
Announced in 2011, the film underwent several rewrites from a draft by Charlie Kaufman, with Jamie Linden, John Lee Hancock, Gary Spinelli, Lindsey Beer, Christopher Ford, and Ness revising it further. Liman was later announced as director in 2016, and principal photography began in 2017. Originally set to release on March 1, 2019, it was removed from schedule to accommodate the film’s reshoots in April 2019 after poor test screenings.
