Coming soon.
Full text transcript of video critique of Incredibles 2
So I just saw the new Disney Pixar nostalgia cash grab, and it was exactly that, and that’s not to say that it was terrible. It was just un special, uninspired and unnecessary. Pixar has become a very different company in the past 10 years. Kind of feels like they don’t even really give a shit anymore. They have plenty of opportunities to make something special and memorable, but instead they just do the laziest shit possible. Now, here’s what I liked about the movie. First of all, the animation was very well done, as expected from Pixar. I actually revisited the first film the night before I saw the sequel. And who, boy, does computer animation not age that well at all. It’s great for 2004, but there are scenes in the first movie that at this point kind of look like shit. It was interesting seeing not only the same characters, but also some of the same sets with more highly detailed textures. The music was fantastic and they kept the original composer from the first film. It was fairly well directed in terms of cinematography and ashot composition. Some of the fight scenes in the second half of the film were creative and fun to watch, and that’s about it. There isn’t really anything else that this film achieved in any way. It just felt like an unnecessary cash grab. It wasn’t someone’s passion project. It was a factory movie made to make money. And those can still be good if they give enough of a shed. But they didn’t. They put in the absolute bare minimum effort to capitalize off of fans of the original. It didn’t have a soul.
One of my issues with this film is that it feels like some of the characters changed completely, which would be better if this film took place a number of years later. But it picks up pretty much exactly where the first film left off. The story is taking place on the same day, but the characters voices have aged 14 years.
Mr. Incredible suddenly sounds like an old geezer, Alaska girl. Sounds like she had a stroke. Suddenly all of her sounds are S.H. sounds. She basically talks like Sean Connery in every scene. Even Violet’s character was noticeably older sounding. All of this was incredibly distracting for the first few scenes of the film, although thankfully I did get used to it eventually. And when I say that their characters have changed, it’s obviously not limited to their voices.
All of a sudden, Mr. Incredible just turns into a huge asshole in this movie. In the first film, he was a lovable goof who was sometimes selfish and inconsiderate. But in this film, he actively wants to see the people he love fail. And it’s clear what they’re going for in those scenes, like this male character doesn’t understand what it’s like to be in the passenger seat, but I feel like they could have still done that without turning him into an absolute asshole with the full context of everything that’s taking place in the plot. They really did not do a good job communicating why he actively wants the people he loves to fail in the context of the film. It is quite literally against his own interests. They just turned him into an asshole and they kind of did the same thing with Dash to whatever he acted out in the first film.
It was closely tied to his motivations as a character. He had very clearly defined wants and goals. His character desperately wanted to prove himself to the best of his abilities. He wanted to be able to show his true potential despite the barriers that had been placed on him by society. When he’s placing tax on the teacher’s chair, he’s not just doing it to be an asshole kid. He’s doing it to prove to himself that he can do it so fast that no one in the class will notice his superpower potential is not being nourished by those around him. So he is finding new ways to do it himself. Outside of that, the most he did was torment his sister like a normal sibling. But in this new movie, he’s just an asshole.
He just does asshole things to be an asshole kid. He no longer has any goals or desires. He just wants to press a lot of buttons and cause a lot of problems. Wow, cool. A button that will kill these innocent people I see live on TV.
I’m going to try to press it. I sure love pressing buttons and fucking up everyone’s day. I don’t care about anybody. I’m just an asshole. Violet’s character acted more or less the same the last a girl didn’t really do anything that felt out of place. And Jack Jack was just annoying. Man, I sure do love cute little babies. I would totally take cute little babies over actual writing effort any day. Why spend any effort writing a clever joke when you can just show a stupid little baby doing something stupid? People will laugh. Hi, Google goog honokaa man. Did you like the part where the stupid, cute little baby did something stupid and cute? Showing a stupid, cute baby in a Disney movie is about as cheap as a jump scare in a horror movie. It’s just a cheap and lazy excuse to avoid having to write something actually funny. I had the baby made baby noises on car clap clap. Hi, I’m a baby too. And I wouldn’t even be so bad if it was just done sparingly.
But of course they spammed the shit out of it. So much so that I wholeheartedly believe that this was the entire reason why they didn’t set this years into the future. I mean, just think about it. We could have had a 1970s or 80s themed movie taking place. Fifteen or twenty years later, the actors voices would be appropriately aged. They would be able to explore so much more about their. Characters. But then we wouldn’t be able to spam baby Jack, Jack, don’t you just love Baby Jack? Jack Ha ha. It’s cute because he makes dumb baby noises and also he’s got superpowers high.
Plus they would actually have to put an extra effort into character design. They’d have to put effort into thinking how these characters would look when they’re older. They’d have to put effort into thinking about how these characters would act when they’re older. Do they have kids, do they have careers, have they matured, etc.?
Nope. Let’s just do the bare minimum. This is a cash grab after all. Why would we put effort into it that we don’t need to? We’ve got Baby Jack, Jack. And that alone will sell the film. Now, obviously, my distaste for the film is not just because they chose to continue from where they left off. For all I know, there could be legitimate reasons why they chose to do this. But even ignoring that aspect to this film is just written so incredibly lazily. This is one of the most predictable movies I’ve ever seen. If you think you know where the plot is going in this film, you definitely fucking know. Now, usually when I see this sort of thing about a kid’s movie, there’s always people who jump in and say, Adam, it’s just a kid’s movie. They have to make it easy to understand because children are the target demographic. But what these people fail to understand is that easy to understand and predictable are two completely different things. In what way would it benefit the child target demographic to be unsurprised by anything that happens in the film? In what way would making things less predictable be detrimental towards the experience of the child target demographic? Watching the film? Kids don’t even understand movie formulas and cliches yet, so I don’t see how they’d benefit from lazy writing at all.
Unless what you really mean to say is, fuck it, it’s a kids movie. Kids movies are allowed to be stupid because kids are stupid, which is a fair argument to make. But I am not a child and this is not a review channel for children. So when I rate a kid’s movie, I’m rating it as a movie. If we’re supposed to give extra points to movies that are made to appeal to stupid people, then we should be doing the same thing for the Transformers films. If somebody takes issue with the lazy writing in a Transformers movie, you could say, no, it doesn’t matter. It’s made for stupid people. They’re not trying to actually put effort into a movie. It’s OK. Why would you criticize a movie for not putting effort into it when it doesn’t want to put effort into it? Suffice it to say, the writing in this film made me feel like they didn’t give a shit. The villain did not make any fucking sense at all. And it’s not to say as though their motivations were never explained, but I almost feel like they might as well not have been. Not only do the motivations not make any fucking sense, but the way that their plan is carried out makes zero fucking sense.
I guess this is an appropriate time for a spoiler talk. So if you don’t want to hear spoilers, just click to this part in the video. There’s your warning, three to one. Now I get what they were trying to go for when it came to the villains motivation. The dad gets killed because the superheroes couldn’t save them. And the brother was like, oh, if only the law wasn’t there. That kept the superheroes from being able to save him. But the sisters thinking, oh, if only he didn’t even think that he needed the superheroes to save him, then he could have just hid in the safe room. So her entire motivation is based off of this idea that superheroes existing is bad for people because it puts them in a situation where they feel as though they need somebody else to save them when they should be doing things for themselves.
But if we’re going to apply that logic, then why doesn’t she also want to get rid of the police and military, let alone the fact that the law was clearly what caused her father to die? He would be totally fine if the law weren’t preventing superheroes from saving him.
And your take away from this is that superheroes should be illegal. What? So you have the guy that’s trying to make superheroes legal again, and then you have the main villain whose only motivation is to keep superheroes being illegal. And they just so happened to be directly related to each other. But for some reason, she actually helps the superheroes get to a point where they are legal again. Why did you do that? Why did you not just keep them illegal? Why on earth did you wait for the ambassadors to sign the document? What part of keeping superheroes illegal required you to first make them legal? Again, nothing she did made any fucking sense. They just gave her a scene where she’s basically like, yep, I’m the villain now. Isn’t that crazy?
I like how she gives that line where she implies she was controlling the pizza man like, oh, you mean you had a good fight with me? And at that point I was expecting some kind of ready player, one shit where she was actually controlling the body of the person that she had under her control. But then later, it turns out that she’s just barking orders at them.
In general, she’s controlling like a dozen people at once. I also like how her only explanation is like, yeah, I got them new goggles. They have like infrared and everything. Yeah, they’re pretty cool. Like, her entire fucking scheme relies on people being too stupid to understand what she’s doing. The entire thing is being broadcast live on television. The superheroes are all wearing goggles that they’ve never worn before and are. Suddenly acting very strange, you don’t think someone at home is going to tie that to the screen slaver thing that was also broadcast on television, the one where it was thoroughly explained that they were able to control people’s minds?
You don’t think someone’s going to remember how similar those goggles look? How the hell was this ever supposed to work? The main villains, entire plan is just so convoluted and stupid, nothing makes any sense at all. Sure, the plot of the first film could be considered by the books or even cliched, but at least the villain was well defined. The characters had relatable motivations. Things made sense. You know, there is one more thing that I remember liking about this movie, I guess, and that’s that the setting felt a lot more clearly defined than the first film.
Both of these movies take place during the 60s, but this movie actually feels like it takes place during the 60s, like the first movie kind of just forgot. But that’s about the only thing that this movie did better. Overall, it was pretty terribly paced.
It felt like it had a really long first act and then went straight into the third. That whole A and B story thing just kind of dragged on for a while. Felt like more of a sitcom than a movie. Oh, yeah. I also liked Frozen in this movie. I’m glad I got more screen time in his powers were kind of cool to watch. He was the only character I didn’t really hate anyway. I guess I’m pretty much done talking about this on special average cash grab to anyone who wants to say that it’s just a kid’s movie. I wholeheartedly agree with you. So we should not be treating it like it’s anything more. And I’m giving this one a five out of 10.v
Be the first to leave a review.