Chaos Walking

As a huge fan of both Daisy Ridley and Tom Holland as well as the Chaos Walking trilogy by Patrick Ness (I think it is a brilliant examination of colonization, the treatment of indigenous peoples, resource allocation, the abuse of power, loss of innocence, and the futility of war), I have been looking forward to the movie adaptation of the first book, The Knife of Never Letting Go, for what seems like forever.  I was so excited to see a Thursday preview last night but I ended up being very disappointed.  I know that a movie adaptation cannot possibly include everything from the source material because of time constraints but it seems like the big ideas of the novel are excluded in favor of very generic action sequences.  Viola Eade (Ridley) is a member of a scouting expedition for a larger group of settlers from Earth on their way to a planet called the New World.  Her ship crashes on this planet and she is the only survivor.  She encounters Todd Hewitt (Holland) in a settlement of earlier colonizers called Prentisstown, where all of the women have mysteriously disappeared and the men have their thoughts on display in a phenomenon called the Noise. The Mayor, David Prentiss (Mads Mikkelsen), and Aaron (David Oyelowo), a mysterious preacher, view Viola and the new settlers on their way as a threat.  Todd wants to help her so his adoptive fathers Ben (Demian Bichir) and Cillian (Kurt Sutter) tell him about other settlements on New World and they go on the run so Viola can contact the mother ship.  However, Todd's Noise makes it difficult for them to hide leading to an epic confrontation and revelations about what happened to all of the women in Prentisstown.  Todd is very one-dimensional without any of the coming of age and loss of innocence character arcs from the book and his only motivation seems to be getting a kiss from Viola but Holland is appealing enough in the role.  Viola is a bit more interesting with a few throwaway lines about the indigenous species (there is a random scene involving the Spackle that makes absolutely no sense) and the abuse of power but she is mostly reactionary.  Ridley is also very appealing and she does what she can with the role but watching someone run from Point A to Point B gets boring after a while.  The Mayor's motivation is a bit unclear (although he has some great costumes) and there isn't any development of how he is able to rule over everyone or of his connection to Todd beyond a few throwaway lines.  The other characters don't have much to do and I was really disappointed with how Davy Jr. (Nick Jonas) and Hildy (Cynthia Erivo), in particular, are underutilized.  The action sequences are surprisingly bland but I did really like the visual representation of the Noise.  Finally, I really hated the conclusion (the biggest deviation from the book) because it is very rushed and certain events make the adaptation of the next two books impossible (which might be a good thing).  Fans of Holland and Ridley will probably really enjoy this but fans of the books will be disappointed.  Ugh!