Movie Review: 'Shadow in the Cloud' Kicks off 2021 with a Blast

The first movie release of 2021 is a super fun little creature feature with a whole lot of girl power energy. Shadow in the Cloud, arriving in theaters on January 1st, does the honor of starting off 2021 with a surprise, a really fun, very silly, World War 2 creature movie that is smartly brief at a mere 82 minute runtime, and wildly fun in a low budget fashion. Starring Chloe Grace Moretz, Shadow in the Cloud doesn’t overstay its welcome and delivers a brisk number of twists and thrills.

It’s 1943 in Aukland, New Zealand. A female pilot named Maude has forged her name on some documents and pushed her way aboard a supply plane headed for American Samoa. She’s carrying with her a strange looking bag which, according to her orders, is not to be opened by anyone, even the plane’s Captain, played by Callen Mulvey. As far as the crew is concerned, she’s an interloper and they view her with contempt but they respect the order from a supposedly hardass General.

With no room for Flight Officer Maude Garret, she’s forced to hand off her package to Sgt Quaid (Taylor John Smith), while she rides in the bubble, the gunnery on the bottom of the plane. The plane is well armed but they are not expecting any combat as Japanese planes have not been shown to be able to make the trip from Japan to New Zealand. However, that will change as this story progresses and will force Maude to prove her metal.

But first, there is another issue to contend with, a real life gremlin. As Maude is stuck in a glass bubble under the plane she can see just about everything. This includes seeing a gremlin which has begun to claw away at one of the wings of the plane and destroyed one of the four engines. Naturally, no one believes Maude’s story, even as the plane continues to suffer from strange malfunctions and inexplicable damage.

Is Maude crazy? She is all alone in the belly of the plane, almost upside down in the clouds. Is she perhaps hallucinating? This question lingers for a while and one of the really exciting aspects of Shadow in the Cloud is star Chloe Grace Moretz wrestling with so many conflicting notions. For most of Shadow in the Cloud, we are with Maude in this glass bubble underneath the plane as she interacts with the crew via the radio.

It’s a daring approach from first time feature director Roseanne Liang who allows her young star to carry the day with her charisma and pluck. She gets a lot of help from a clever screenplay by the ever problematic yet talented Max Landis, who keeps up the Twilight Zone inspired surprises throughout including creating an ever increasing intrigue about what is in Maude’s bag. I can tell you now, you are unlikely to guess where that story is headed.

Shadow in the Cloud does struggle with some dodgy special effects, especially during a late in the film fight on the wing between Maude and the supposed gremlin. The effects are poorly rendered and the seeming danger of the situation is made rather moot but it doesn’t, by any measure, ruin the fun of Shadow in the Cloud. The performance by Chloe Grace Moretz, the best of her career since her star-making role as Hit-Girl in Kickass, is far too good to be ruined by a couple poor effects shots.

More often than not, the first new movie of any year is terrible - see 2020's The Grudge as proof. Usually, Hollywood studios look to offload some long on the shelf trash onto a weekend when they assume no one will be going to the movies. That, thankfully, is not the case as we kick off 2021. Shadow in the Cloud is a blast, a fun, silly, twisty, and quickly paced adventure with monsters and gun battles in the sky and one terrific lead performance from Chloe Grace Moretz.

Shadow in the Cloud opens in theaters January 1st.