This film’s title couldn’t be more apt.
Writer/co-director Qui Nguyen must’ve been smoking the good stuff when he concocted this psychedelic fever dream of an animated fantasy, and I’m amazed Disney was willing to release it. The chaotic, so-called story is a random mess that demands far too much patience from viewers, before finally sorta-kinda delivering a mildly clever ecological message.
 |
| Jaeger (far left), his son Searcher (center) and grandson Ethan, attempt to bond over an elaborate card game, while faithful pooch Legend and the blobby blue Splat participate in their own way. |
One must be careful, particularly with fantasy, to establish a firm set of rules … and then follow them. If reality — as we know it — is to be warped, events must emerge in a manner that remains comprehensible.
But Nguyen and co-director Don Hall throw far too much stuff on the screen, and their core character story element — the often fractious relationship that results, when fathers expect too much of their sons — gets lost in this cacophonous assault on the senses.
We get tired of all the stuff and nonsense, long before the (supposedly) happy ending.
In an effort to make sense of the senseless…
Brawny, laugh-in-the-face-of-danger Jaeger Clade (voiced by Dennis Quaid) has long been an exploratory hero in the hamlet of Avalonia, a pre-industrial community surrounded on all sides by an extremely tall mountain range. His previous exploits notwithstanding, Jaeger is determined to discover what’s beyond those mountains.
All of his death-defying expeditions have been made alongside his son Searcher (Jake Gyllenhaal), a teenager when we first meet him. Alas, Jaeger is blind to the fact that Searcher is a reluctant companion at best. The story begins with Jaeger’s latest effort to summit the mountains, which goes awry when Searcher is distracted by an odd, lime-green plant with small spherical “fruit pods” that give off an electric charge when touched.
Searcher wants to return to Avalonia with this plant, believing it could become an important power source. Jaeger stubbornly insists on pushing ahead … by himself.
Flash-forward 25 years.
Searcher has become a successful farmer of pando, the name he has given to the plant that now covers massive acres of his land. He has a wife, Meridian (Gabrielle Union); they have a 16-year-old son, Ethan (Jaboukie Young-White).
Jaeger has been missing the entire time: presumed dead, and honored with a statue in the town square.
Avalonia has been transformed into a modern metropolis wherein everything — from kitchen blenders to aircraft — is powered by the green charge of pando. Searcher’s discovery has completely revolutionized his community.
Ah, but crisis awaits: Outlying crops of pando are succumbing to some disease, which — at the current rate of spread — soon will wipe out everything. Botanists have determined that all pando plants are interconnected by a single massive glowing green root that extends far beneath the surface.
More intriguing, while attempting to follow the root below ground, they’ve discovered a huge circular tunnel that descends farther than anybody can determine.
Avalonia President Callisto Mal (Lucy Liu) has mounted an expedition in a huge aircraft; she wants Searcher to join them.
“I’m a farmer,” he insists, “not an explorer.”
Ethan, eager for adventure, can’t understand why his father would refuse such a request.
Well, of course Searcher finally agrees; he insists that Ethan remain behind, due to the danger potential. Again, no surprise: Searcher quickly discovers that Ethan has stowed aboard, along with their lovable three-legged dog, Legend … and Meridian soon pops up as well.
At this point, the ship is attacked by scores of winged, luminous, hot pink “terror-dactyls,” which force a crash-landing in a day-glo underworld that defies description, and is laden with startling creatures, many of them quite dangerous.
They include — among dozens of others — translucent and tentacled reapers, abstract flocks of goblinswills, transportasaurses, oblong-shaped flatty patties, and lizard-shaped clouds o’ war. Contrary to all previous Disney animated critters, all of these weirdies have neither eyes, noses nor mouths.
But because this is a Disney animated film — which demands a “cute factor” — Ethan soon befriends a small, multi-limbed, blobby blue entity he nicknames Splat. Which turns out to be useful. Most of the time.
Attempting to follow the massive, glowing pando root, once the plane is repaired, proves increasingly hazardous. Sohazardous, in fact, that our characters’ reckless behavior — particularly in Ethan’s case — becomes ridiculous.
Nguyen’s approach, from this point forward, seems to hail from the school of “Throw stuff against the wall, and see what sticks.” The effort to maintain a tone of swashbuckling derring-do, in the face of such obvious mortal peril, is ludicrous. Indeed, this film’s PG rating is generous; I suspect young children will find numerous sequences much too scary.
On top of which, the lesson to be learned from the core family dynamic is blindingly obvious; we get impatient while waiting for Searcher to realize that he has become just as stubbornly blind as Jaeger was, in terms of his expectations of Ethan.
In fairness, the climactic “surprise reveal” lends legitimate purpose and reason to some of what has come before … but it’s much too little, and far too late. This destination isn’t worth the bizarre, 90-minute dissonance that precedes it.
Jaeger, Searcher, Meridian, Ethan and Callisto would have been engaging characters in a better film.
This one’s a mess.
No comments:
Post a Comment