BEFORE: I can still make my Easter film on time, though my review may get posted on Monday instead of Sunday, it will still count. I just have to squeeze one more Jason Momoa film into the weekend - I took a nap after my shift at the theater, so I'm all set, plus I came home with half a box of brewed coffee, so I can stay up late. Tomorrow we'll drive out to Long Island so my wife can buy cigarettes, and we'll have a nice lunch somewhere, and then home to post.
Jason Momoa carries over again from "Conan the Barbarian".
THE PLOT: A young girl discovers the secret map to the dreamworld of Slumberland and with the help of an eccentric outlaw, she traverses dreams and flees nightmares with the hope to be able to see her late father again.
AFTER: Sure, I got the response programming time for "Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom" down to two months, but then on the other hand, it took me fourteen years to watch the "Conan the Barbarian" reboot. Really, though, it's been on my list and my DVR for about 10 months. But then there's "Slumberland", which came on Netflix in November 2022, I think. So OK, a year and a half there, but to be fair, I didn't have any other Jason Momoa films to link it too, and really, that was one of only a very few options. Honestly I prefer it this way, with fewer linking choices, it really makes my task easier than, say, deciding when to watch "Oppenheimer" and "Barbie", which both present me with TOO MANY linking choices, and I can only use two for each.
It took me just a bit too long to figure out this film's source material or inspiration, the fact that the main character is named "Nemo" was the tip-off. It's not the PIXAR film "Finding Nemo", that would be ridiculous - no, it's the early 1900's newspaper comic "Little Nemo in Slumberland" which was drawn by Winsor McCay. In each strip a boy named Nemo would fall asleep and then for the next few panels, he'd have part of a wonderful, magical, impossible adventure in the dream world, until he woke up in the last panel. McCay was also an early animator, and I think pioneered the concept of delayed gratification, as in not much would happen in each strip, because the character would wake up and the adventure would be over for another week, but stay tuned because NEXT time something cool might actually happen. Maybe. It took YEARS for Nemo to finally arrive in the kingdom of Slumberland, at the request of King Morpheus, and presumbly McCay got paid for each strip, over all that time. A similar technique today keeps Marvel and DC fans buying comic books, and soap opera fans tuning in, day after day, thinking today's episode might be the one where someone finishes a conversation or actually eats a meal or something.
The strips aren't widely read today, partially because the artist's depictions of African tribesmen would be considered quite racist - it was a different time - but the innovative uses of form, lettering, panel size and intricate backgrounds with fantastical cityscapes and enormous impossible palaces must have blown the minds of people in 1905. And the comic was probably best enjoyed after smoking reefer, so it may have created the first generation of comic-book obsessed stoner nerds. The dream world had its own moral code, and prominently featured recurring dream-fears like falling, drowning, or growing to giant-size - would we even have the "Sandman" comics or movies like "Ant-Man & the Wasp: Quantumania" if not for Winsor McCay?
Flip was a character in the original comic strip, he was a green clown with a giant hat that read "WAKE UP" and he would come to disrupt Nemo's dreams, to prevent him from ever reaching the kingdom of Slumberland, thus prolonging the adventure and Mr. McCay's paychecks. This character has carried over, only now played by Jason Momoa as a large horned man-ogre, albeit one dressed like a dandy who has knowledge about how to traverse the dream realm, from one recurring dream to another via secret hidden doors. But he's looking for the map of the dream realm, and he believes that Nemo's father had a copy. It's possible at first to believe that Flip is just part of Nemo's dream, as her father would relate tales of his own outlaw adventures with Flip as bedtime stories for Nemo.
After her father is lost at sea, Nemo has dreams where she's returned to the lighthouse where they lived (I see lighthouses are back as a trend, remember that Aquaman's father lives in one...) and she finds Flip searching for the map. With her is her stuffed pig, Pig, who is her alive companion in the dream world, and a signal that we are within her dream, and it's Pig (or the Pig part of her own brain) that locates the map among her father's possessions. This is somewhat similar to the movie "Time Bandits", where the six dwarves had a map of all the time-doors, with a giant door in the middle representing the Time of Legends. On this map the largest space is the Nightmare Realm, and the theory is that if Nemo and Flip can get to this dangerous place and obtain some of it's treasured pearls, Nemo could bring her father back somehow.
Together they travel through the dreams of a small child driving a truck through a city made of blue glass, a ballroom made of flowers or butterflies where a woman salsa dances, and a bathroom where a bald man dreams that he has hair again. Each time they have to locate the door to the adjoining realm, so it's kind of a multiverse of things people dream about, and apparently some people dream of flying on giant geese. Canadians, right? But they're pursued by a massive tentacled nightmare creature (tentacles seem to be another theme this week, there was an octopus in "Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom" and a giant tentacled monster in "Conan the Barbarian") and also Agent Green of the Bureau of Subconscious Activities, who's been trying to arrest Flip for 30 years because of the way he breaks into people dreams and steals stuff.
Meanwhile, in the real world, Nemo is sent to live in a city apartment with her uncle, who's simply the most boring person ever, he owns a company that makes doorknobs because, well, somebody has to, and she is sent to public school for the first time ever, and even though the school is full of nerds and there are plenty of nerdy clubs to join, she still sees herself as an outsider, and much prefers going to sleep in a hammock in the school's basement so she can continue to visit Slumberland with Flip and work their way toward the Nightmare Realm. Inevitably Agent Green catches up with them and locks Flip up in prison, so Nemo has to find a way to bust him out so their dream quest can continue, oh, if only she knew someone in the real world who was an expert on doors, doorknobs and locks...
I figured out the twist long before it was revealed, even if Flip forgot his name in the real world there were only a couple people he could be. OK, one, really. But it's a good twist, it makes sense and there's good character growth when the dreamer is reunited with his human side. But Flip is so shaken up that he won't travel through the final door into the Realm of Nightmares, leaving Nemo to face the dangerous place on her own, or so it seems. Even if she gets a pearl, is it even possible to bring back her father, or is she in for a terrible disappointment if the dream world doesn't work the way she wants it to? That's really the worst thing about our dreams, the feeling that every night we can't control them, we're vulnerable to our brain being forced to torment us with the situations and the feelings that frighten us the most. It's too bad we can't just turn our brains off for the sleeping hours, or at least have some way to control them, to have only good dreams instead of nightmares. (Whatever happened with that "lucid dreaming" fad, anyway?)
Really, this came off to me as similar to the early films of Terry Gilliam, not just "Time Bandits", which I absolutely loved but maybe watched a few too many times, but also "Brazil" and "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen", which were all great films before Gilliam started making more questionable ones like "Tideland" and "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote". But the great Gilliam fantasy films were all about how our dreams are there for a reason, they show us parts of our own lives that we want to remember, other parts that may scare us, or can be hints to things we need to work on, realities we need to face but can't seem to bring ourselves around to doing that. (See also "The Wizard of Oz", "Alice in Wonderland" and many others)
Also starring Marlow Barkley, Chris O'Dowd (last seen in "Love After Love"), Kyle Chandler (last seen in "Broken City"), Cameron Nicoll, Antonio Raine Pastore, Weruche Opia, India de Beaufort (last seen in "Run Fatboy Run"), Chris D'Silva (last seen in "My Spy"), Yanna McIntosh (last seen in "The Sentinel"), Jacob So, Izaak Smith (last seen in "Marmaduke"), Michael Blake, Humberly Gonzalez (last seen in "Nobody"), Ava Cheung, Leslie Adlam (last seen in "In the Shadow of the Moon"), Jamillah Ross, Tonya Cornelisse (last seen in "Dolittle"), Owais Sheikh, Sergio Osuna, Luxton Handspiker, Katerina Taxia
RATING: 8 out of 10 escutcheons
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