BEFORE: Karan Soni carries over from "The People We Hate at the Wedding" and I'm going to get back to Ben Platt in just a couple of days - and you can probably guess what movie I'm heading for. It's a little too early for a back-to-school film, but the linking takes me where it takes me. I could try to re-shuffle things around, but at this point I'd rather not, now that a clear path to Christmas has been found.
I know I used Karan Soni as a link already this year, from "Unicorn Store" to "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse" when I found out that Nic Cage's voice wasn't used in that Spider-sequel. Hey, there's no rule that says I can only use an actor as a link once in a calendar year. Should there be? Nah.
Everybody was talking about this movie late last year and then, I don't know, it kind of feels like it just dropped out of sight. Or maybe it just dropped on Disney Plus, but I'm wondering why it just fizzled out so suddenly.
THE PLOT: The legendary Clades are a family of explorers whose differences threaten to topple their latest and most crucial mission.
AFTER: Well, I read this movie all wrong - after seeing the trailer for it late last year, I assumed it was about a family that traveled to another planet, but no, it's not that at all. I guess maybe that's been done to death? Or if they did that, I'd be sitting here complaining about how it would have taken 50 years to get to the next planet because you can't travel close to the speed of light. So, thankfully, this isn't that. Instead it's more like "Journey to the Center of the Earth", where a group of adventurers discovers a subterranean world with all kinds of fantastic creatures. But also, that's been done before, so it's not really that either, it's kind of its own thing.
It's very cagey at the start, because the film is set in a fictional country, Avalonia, so we're not sure where that is on Earth, or even if it's on Earth at all. And also, WHEN does this take place, because it first appears that the people have technology like horse-drawn wagons, so late 1800's, maybe? And is this society somehow cut off from the rest of the world, like the people seem like Americans, but maybe they're on an island or in some hidden valley in a mountain range or something? Yeah, that seems a bit closer, because the elder Clade, Jaeger Clade, is determined to cross some mountains and find out what's on the other side, to save his people.
However, on the way out, the younger Clade, Searcher, discovers these weird electric plants, and decides that THIS might be the way to save their people, by harnessing the power of the plants - and this leads the father and son to argue over, well, everything, but mostly how to save their people and whether the son of an explorer should ALSO be an explorer, and not something silly like a farmer.
It's clear that this is another film pitched at kids that is designed to foster racial harmony and acceptance, with a racially-mixed couple at the hear of the story, also the half-black teen boy is out and proud, and nobody seems to have a problem with it, even his grandfather who's been absent for 30 years. Wouldn't he be more likely to have an outdated viewpoint toward something? The fact that his grandson is mixed-race and queer doesn't bother him at all - I mean, it's great and positive but also it doesn't really ring true. The older people in our society tend to be the ones most set in their ways, and more likely to have old-school prejudices about race and sexual orientation. So I guess maybe he's cool with it, or perhaps so far in denial that he doesn't even want to talk about it?
HOWEVER, there's still such a long way to go - I mean, like kudos for fixing homophobia and all that, but this still seems mostly like a patriarchal society, like mostly it's men making all the big decisions - what's up with that? And why is everybody so hung up on what career each man should have, but nobody seems to care what any women choose to do for a living? Not really equitable, is it? Why are there three MALE characters on the poster, and none of the female ones? Are they by definition less important just because they're women? Another strange decision - sure, I can get how the marketing department might naturally assume that more boys might want to see a sci-fi film than girls, but then that's even MORE reason why they should try to market the film to those girls, and putting some female representation on the poster could help with that.
(I mean, the character of Callisto Mal is supposed to be the PRESIDENT of Avalonia, and I didn't even pick up on that. There is a woman president, and this fact just gets glossed over, barely even mentioned. Sorry, ladies, you can have your progress but male writers and directors are just NOT going to let you enjoy it.)
Look, it's been a tough week here at the Movie Year for men - starting with "Bruised" last Tuesday, nearly every film has featured an abusive husband or boyfriend, or a father who was so into his job as an astronaut or superhero that he neglected his own children. Or worse, as seen in "The People We Hate at the Wedding", one of Donna's husbands left her and the other one died, and what effect did that have on her children? They're all very messed up. So here we have Jaeger Clade who left his family to go exploring, but not before clashing with his son about what he should do for a living. Searcher Clade takes the other route, he does NOT want his son Ethan to be in danger, so he tells him to stay and watch the farm, even though he doesn't want to be a farmer. AND so Searcher falls into the same trap as his father, he demands that his son follow in his footsteps, without taking his son's wishes into consideration. So, we're right back to "men are real dicks", aren't we?
But I'm trying to be nice here, because there's a more important message, an environmental one. Our heroes discover that their world doesn't work they way they thought it did at all, that the electrical plants that power their airships and radios and TVs are actually harming the whole ecosystem, to the point where it's destroying it. Gee, does that sound like any other planet we know? It's going to take sacrifice on everyone's part to maybe give up some of their electronic devices and vehicles so save their world, but they're willing to do it, even though there's a large probability that it's already too late, because they didn't understand their own dangerous impact on their home. Yeah, this is a bit of an important metaphor, I just hope our kids can drag themselves away from the video-games long enough to understand it. But also it's a bit weird hearing this from a movie that Disney wanted people to watch on their phones and computers - unless they DON'T want us to watch it and we should turn our devices off instead? Nah, that would be weird.
There's still something weird about the way this film was released, however - and since it "only" made $73 million in theaters with a budget of $120 million, this was considered a box office failure. But since it had a prominent gay character, Disney Corp was afraid that certain countries would censor the movie, so it chose to NOT release the film in those countries. Well, maybe there's your problem, if your method of fighting censorship is to just concede to it. Look, I'm not a marketing person, but I know you can't make money in the countries where you DON'T release the film, so maybe the film might have made MORE money if it were released in MORE countries. Just math. The correct tactic to take is to say to those Middle Eastern and Asian countries, "We're Disney, and we don't like your censorship, so you either show the film intact, or not at all." Everybody wants to make money by screening a Disney film, right? But if you don't even give them the chance to change, then they're never going to, and you've accomplished nothing - those are the countries where people NEED to see gay characters the most, and now that's not going to happen. This is more like fighting all the sexism in college sports by cancelling all of the women's games. Problem solved?
Maybe it's because I've spent the last three days helping my wife navigate sidequests in "Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom", but man, to me this underworld sure did look like the Depths area underneath the kingdom in this new sequel video-game. Only with a lot more light - in Zelda you have to throw a brightbloom seed every once in a while so you can see where you're going, but once you activate all the Lightroots (there's one under every shrine in the game) it does seem to get a lot easier. But the giant mushroom/trees/whatevers sure look similar - I guess the movie came out first, but they must have been designing the video-game for YEARS, because the virtual world is so huge. Anyway, she finished almost all the side adventures and side quests, with me helping by navigating (just like when we're on vacation) and so tomorrow she'll probably defeat Ganon and start over. Man, if I played this game I'd probably do nothing BUT the side quests, and also try to cook every damn recipe in the game, and there are a LOT of them.
Also starring the voices of Jake Gyllenhaal (last seen in "Lovely & Amazing"), Dennis Quaid (last seen in "Dinner with Friends"), Jaboukie Young-White (last seen in "Set It Up"), Gabrielle Union (last seen in "Welcome to Collinwood"), Lucy Liu (last seen in "Shazam! Fury of the Gods"), Alan Tudyk (last heard in "Raya and the Last Dragon"), Adelina Anthony, Abraham Benrubi (last seen in "The Call of the Wild"), Jonathan Melo, Nik Dodani (last seen in "Other People"), Francesca Reale (last seen in "Yes, God, Yes"), Emily Kuroda (last seen in "RED"), Reed Buck, Katie Lowes (last seen in "Side Effects"), LaNisa Frederick, Dave Kohut, Alice Kina Diehl,
RATING: 6 out of 10 Reapers
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