A young woman, Captain Maude Garrett (Chloë Grace Moretz), finds herself in a deadly hair-raising adventure. All she planned on doing was hitching a ride with a combat Royal Air Force B-17 Flying Fortress plane during World War 2. The chance of being on a plane which is likely to get blown out of the sky would be enough for me to pass up that trip. So, obviously, she had a good reason for being there—a secret mission to deliver a satchel for the base commander. Unfortunately, something else hitches a ride as well.
She was constantly trying to help the crew with the battle since she did have some flying experience but she was insulted at every turn, basically told to stay in her place as a woman. So much so that the captain (Callan Mulvey) commanded that she be locked in the lower gun turret “for her own safety” especially after she mentioned the creature she saw flying in the cloud.
The plane was in terrible shape that they all found out eventually when they tried to do things like get her out of the turret once the two battles started: the one with the enemy planes and the one with the creature. She constantly asked if her top secret satchel was ok, and she asked a certain crew member to keep an eye on it.
Because the crew couldn’t get her out of the turret, she had to fight the creature alone. She was “Wonder Woman in fatigues”. What was the creature attacking her? It was the mythological Gremlin that is credited with tearing military planes apart. It had wings like a bat, long teeth, long arms and legs, and a long tail. It was nothing like the puppet-like creatures in the Gremlins horror movie comedies.
According to Wikipedia, “a gremlin is a mischievous folkloric creature that causes malfunctions in aircraft or other machinery. Often, they are described or depicted as animals with spiky backs; large, strange eyes; and small, clawed frames featuring sharp teeth. Originates in Royal Air Force (RAF) slang among British pilots stationed in Malta, the Middle East, and India in the 1920s, with earliest recorded printed use being in a poem published in the journal, Aeroplane in Malta, April 10, 1929.”
There were two other horror dramas about gremlins: the Twilight Zone episode, “Nightmare at 20,000 feet” with William Shatner (1963), directed by Richard Donner, based on a short story by Richard Matheson. Also, there was Twilight Zone The Movie, “The Gremlin on the Wing” (1983), with John Lithgow suffering from aviophobia.
I first saw Chloë Grace Moretz as a daughter in the re-make of the horror movie The Amityville Horror (2005) with Ryan Reynolds; as a child vampire and the only vampire in the movie, Let Me In (2010). This movie was re-made from the 2008 Swedish-speaking movie with subtitles, “Let the Right One In”, that I also saw. She was also the goddaughter in the movie Hugo (2011).
Chloë also starred as Hit Girl in the Kick-Ass movies (2010) and Kick-Ass 2 (2013). I also saw her as the werewolf daughter in the movie Dark Shadows (2012), as Carrie in the movie Carrie (2013), a Russian gang victim in the Equalizer movie with Denzel Washington in 2014, and the action movie The 5th Wave (2016) about aliens taking over the earth. There may be The 5th Wave 2 coming in 2022 I hope because the first one left me hanging.
I got a copy of Shadow in the Cloud from the library but would have liked to see it on the big screen. It’s action-action-action! The director is Roseanne Liang.
There was a tribute to military women at the close of the movie!
Written by Rosa L. Griffin
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