![](https://addisfortune.news/wp-content/themes/addis-fortune/images/defaultPhots/commentary.jpg)
Commentaries | Oct 21,2023
Some movies require a specific mood and environment for watching.
Sometimes, we want a movie to not be too complicated, but easy to understand, the sort where the story takes the audience on a fun and quirky journey. At the same time, it should not insult our intelligence. Fun is good, but the cost of a movie ticket — a cool 100 Br these days — should be justified somehow. We deserve more than someone slipping on a banana peel for our money’s worth.
Shadow in the Clouds is that compromise. It is a movie about an American soldier attempting to smuggle her baby but while trapped in a warplane turret and being harassed by sexist British soldiers. All the while, she fights Japanese fighter planes and the strange monsters that appear on the bottom of the aircraft as they travel over New Zealand.
The film stars Chloe Grace Moretz as Maude, a flight officer with a top-secret mission. She is to board the bomber plane, named "The Fool’s Errand," to deliver documents no one is allowed to see. Inside, she meets British officers dumbfounded at seeing a "broad" onboard. Since there is no place for her to sit, she is told to make herself cosy in the turret.
It is in this confined place that the best scenes of the movie take place. The camera does not leave the space for the better part of the first and second acts. It stays with her, sometimes intercut with images of the men as she imagines them talking to her through the radio.
The scenes in the turret can be read symbolically. Starting from her sighting of a monster — "gremlin" — at the bottom of the plane, which she relays to the other male officers, she also spots a Japanese fighter plane close by.
In both instances, they discount what she has seen out of hand. This is an allegory in how women's lived experiences are discounted without so much as a thought. Soon enough, in the plane, the male officers begin to suggest that the confined space is getting to her, that she is delusional. The fact that the fighter plane does appear and is later shot down by her from the turret does not change their attitudes.
In fact, all the turret scenes could be symbolic of psychological isolation in a patriarchal world. Her perspective is denied a platform - as when they disconnect her from the radio - and her story is challenged due to her position as a woman.
The turret scene does not last the entire movie. But it is after this that the film stops being a thriller. It mutates into a full-blown action movie, where the male soldiers are no longer the foe, but a gremlin that taunts them until they have to learn to fight it together.
Somewhere in the movie, it is revealed that Maude has brought a baby with her. Although unexplored by the disappointing, rather cartoonish, third act, it adds to the movie's theme.
Perhaps the whole movie is a metaphor for being a mother out of wedlock. The constant lies, as when she has to pretend she is carrying with her a top-secret document, not a baby, just to get a plane ride; the social ostracisation, as when she is made to stay in the turret; the constant taunting as sexually promiscuous; the lack of understanding and compassion; and finally, being left alone to protect her baby from whatever the world throws at her, as when she has to fight off a monster all by herself.
The film is no Thelma and Lewis. But for a monster movie, it is as close to being an allegory on gender relations as one can get.
PUBLISHED ON
Jan 23,2021 [ VOL
21 , NO
1082]
Commentaries | Oct 21,2023
Commentaries | Aug 17,2019
Life Matters | Jun 13,2020
Commentaries | Nov 20,2021
Agenda | Sep 11,2020
Featured | Jan 01,2023
Sunday with Eden | Sep 18,2021
Sunday with Eden | Nov 13,2021
Commentaries | Mar 05,2022
Viewpoints | Jun 15,2024
My Opinion | 108818 Views | Aug 14,2021
My Opinion | 105216 Views | Aug 21,2021
My Opinion | 104026 Views | Sep 10,2021
My Opinion | 103320 Views | Aug 07,2021
Jul 20 , 2024
In a volatile economic environment, sudden policy reversals leave businesses reeling...
Jul 13 , 2024
Policymakers are walking a tightrope, struggling to generate growth and create millio...
Jul 7 , 2024
The federal budget has crossed a symbolic threshold, approaching the one trillion Bir...
Jun 29 , 2024
In a spirited bid for autonomy, the National Bank of Ethiopia (NBE), under its younge...
Jul 21 , 2024 . By TIZITA SHEWAFERAW
Mayor Adanech Abebie's Administration faced an audit report that unveiled a startling...
Jul 21 , 2024 . By AKSAH ITALO
Brook Taye (PhD), director general of the Ethiopian Capital Market Authority, has tak...
Jul 21 , 2024 . By AKSAH ITALO
Ethiopia's horticulture, a major source of foreign currency and employment, is facing...
Jul 21 , 2024 . By AKSAH ITALO
Commercial banks are now permitted to acquire equity shares in capital market service...