INCREDIBLES 2 - By Brett Blake THE INCREDIBLES is my favorite Pixar movie. As such, my expectations for INCREDIBLES 2 were very, very high. Did it meet them? Mostly! The first INCREDIBLES is a better overall movie, with a significantly better villain and slightly better character drama surrounding the family. INCREDIBLES 2 tops the first in the realms of the action and the quality of the animation, but its story doesn’t come to full fruition like the first film’s does... though it gets close. It’s a worthy successor, but it can’t quite recreate the exact magical concoction that makes the first film such a, well, incredible entertainment. Just as with the previous movie, this story is just as concerned with the dynamics of the Parr family as it is with providing action and laughs; indeed, taken as a pair, the INCREDIBLES films are almost certainly the most emotionally mature entries in Pixar’s canon. The scenes between Bob and Helen as they discuss their lives and their family concerns are pitched at a very high level of intelligence and have a grounded relatability to them, as do the characters' individual arcs. Despite being superheroes in a big-scale animated adventure-comedy, they are arguably the most realistic (in terms of motivations and feelings) human characters in pretty much any mainstream animated movie I can think of, and that is to writer/director Brad Bird’s great credit. The animation on display here is frequently just dazzling, amazing stuff. The way the "camera" is able to zoom and fly around (with purpose, not just for the sake of it), the way lighting is used to evoke particularly atmospheric moods, and the exaggerated character and set designs are all absolutely top-notch. A love of 1960s aesthetics is splashed all over the screen in pretty delightful fashion, too. Composer Michael Giacchino’s score is somehow even snazzier and jazzier than his first, and while it still has the swaggering, James Bondian flavor, it’s doing more of its own thing here. Giacchino expands the scope a little bit to include some different colors, and not just in a purely pastiche-y way, but in a way that feels fresh and fun. Where the movie sort of does fumble the ball is when it comes to the villain, the Screenslaver. There was so much potential with a character like this to fully act as a mirror for our heroes, to reflect back at them elements of who they are and to reflect back on us - the audience - current concerns about how it’s so easy to become lost in - and addicted to - our devices and screens. However, outside of a terrific moment where the Screenslaver’s underlying philosophy (one that I think will ring true for many in the audience) is explicitly laid out, the script never takes any of this all the way. It doesn’t add enough to make these great ideas, which are mostly there under the surface, truly sing in an impactful way. The character also ends up being a bit of a muddled creation, with multiple motivations that don’t necessarily feel like natural extensions of each other. So INCREDIBLES 2 is not fully the home run I might have hoped, but it’s awfully close, and fans of the first movie will almost certainly have a total blast with this one. I think we’ll be hard-pressed to find a more good-natured and earnestly entertaining movie the rest of this year. JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM - By Brett Blake “Dramatically underwhelming.” Those were the first two words on my mind as the end credits for JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM started to roll. Make no mistake, there are some good things in this movie, including a rollicking and intense third act, but the totality of the thing - for somebody who is as big a fan of JURASSIC PARK as you could possibly find - is definitely on the disappointing end of the spectrum. That all really begins and ends with the screenplay from Derek Connolly and Colin Trevorrow (the director of the previous JURASSIC WORLD). To be blunt, the writing here is just not good. At all. The premise hangs on our willingness to buy into a setup that is patently absurd and populated by characters defined only by their most surface qualities (the human villains of the story, in particular, are so broadly written as to be totally cartoonish). The script also frequently requires characters to behave in ways that are utterly preposterous, and when your story hinges upon the people populating it being monumentally stupid, you have completely failed as a storyteller. It might be weird to get hung-up on the ridiculously unrealistic characters in a movie whose premise is also ridiculously unrealistic, but almost all of these characters feel wildly undercooked or overdone. When looked at in comparison to the main characters of JURASSIC PARK, all of whom feel like plausibly real people, the contrast is truly striking. Only Chris Pratt’s Owen escapes relatively unscathed, but that’s entirely because of Pratt’s sheer force of personality, not the way the character is written. Structurally, the movie is also screwed up, because after the overblown (quite literally) first act, we then tread water for an ungodly amount of time before things do finally click into place for the - admittedly satisfying - final 40-odd minutes. Perhaps most egregiously, the script seems very thematically confused about what its trying to say with respect to the ethics of the situation the dinosaurs find themselves in, and it almost constantly muddles its points with strange choices. It’s just a weird, messy, and uninspired piece of writing. And to address something of the elephant in the room, the magic of seeing these astounding and majestic animals brought back to life is gone. That incredible awe and wonder that JURASSIC PARK captures so well is almost entirely absent from FALLEN KINGDOM, save for a couple of all-too-fleeting moments. To a certain degree, this is to be expected by the time you reach the fifth installment of a franchise like this one, and in the 25 years since that original classic, audiences have grown pretty jaded about digital effects work, but even so... that wondrous quality that makes JURASSIC PARK beloved is missed. That absence of magic does leave a bit of a void in the movie, but - thankfully - the film itself seems to recognize this and attempts to fill that void with a different kind of sensibility: a "creature feature" vibe that permeates the entire second half of the story. Director J.A. Bayona (who previously helmed the wonderful ghost story THE ORPHANAGE) cranks up the atmosphere, ushering in intensity and jolts. This does have a side effect of making the movie feel pulpier - and sillier - than the ones that have come before, but it also does bring a unique flavor to the third act, which has almost a haunted funhouse ride feel, where instead of spirits and poltergeists, we have dinosaurs, and one sinister dinosaur in particular, a genetically-engineered hybrid creature called an Indoraptor. This third act is legitimately a ton of fun, and it ends the movie on quite a high note. But at the end of the day, we should be getting more from this franchise. JURASSIC PARK has such a monumental legacy, and its follow-ups deserve better writing than this, even if the dinosaur spectacle alone still has its charms.
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