The action begins on a planet known only as the New World. In an age defined by plastic cover songs, blockbusters like “The Bourne Identity,” “Edge of Tomorrow,” and whatever nuttiness he’s about to shoot in outer space with Tom Cruise, have proven Doug Liman to be one of the few directors who’s still capable of convincing Hollywood to play jazz that makes it all the more frustrating that “Chaos Walking” is the cinematic equivalent of auto-tune. The few clever bits of world-building in the first act betray a movie that’s deathly afraid of its own foundation, while the small handful of scenes that dare to listen for a melody amidst the cacophony of studio notes only reinforce how flat the rest of the piece sounds. And, much like Todd Hewitt - yes, this is an epic sci-fi story about a kid named Todd - “Chaos Walking” is very bad at doing that. You don’t have to be familiar with the film’s turbulent production history to recognize that “Chaos Walking” has been compromised to the breaking point of basic coherence, as this prefab chunk of post-apocalyptic pablum shares its horny teenage hero’s ritualized determination to smother its true ideas and intentions under a layer of white Noise.

Where to Watch This Week’s New Movies, from ‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. Despite its strange conceit and a few buried hints as to what a more courageous film might have done with it, the movie version of the first “Chaos Walking” book (published as “The Knife of Never Letting Go”) is such a dull and ordinary thing that it can’t help but get engulfed by the shadow of its own missed potential. But the house that “Hunger Games” built appears not to have shared the books’ enthusiasm for messing with the YA formula, Kaufman left the project long before Doug Liman finally rolled cameras on it in 2017, and principal photography on the movie became the first step in the four-year process of sandblasting away everything that once made the source material so exciting.

That’s what it seemed fated to become in 2012 when Lionsgate hired Charlie Kaufman to adapt the first installment of Patrick Ness’ trilogy and its Film Twitter-like premise into a potential franchise-starter. Miller” cosplayers? Where every man’s internal monologue loudly emanates from his head like overlapping speaker feedback in a cloud of “Noise” so intense that you can see it take shape on screen (and where every woman was killed in a recent war with the indigenous species of humanoid monsters)? “ Chaos Walking” could’ve and should’ve been the most arresting, unusual sci-fi blockbuster since “Cloud Atlas.” Or “Mortal Engines,” at the very least. A $125 million studio movie about a human colony on a distant planet of retro-futuristic “McCabe & Mrs.

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