Full text transcript of video review of Incredibles 2
It may be presumptuous to say that Incredibles is the best Pixar film, however, I have probably heard more people say that Incredibles is their favorite film more than any other. It’s not mine, but I perfectly understand why The Incredibles is a spectacular, thought provoking, impeccably scripted, astoundingly directed, stylish superhero subversion action film that fans have been salivating for a sequel since the minute it ended.
And finally, 14 years later, the sequel is pretty good. Not great. It’s pretty good. It’s worth a trip to the theater. It’s a ton of fun, especially to see these characters again.
It’s just not the inspiring experience that the first one is. And that’s my quick take. Before we get into more details, in case you’re worried about even mild spoilers overall, Incredibles two does feel like the natural follow up in terms of picking up the open ended story.
Points of the first with The Incredibles house destroyed the baby developing powers and battling the Underminer. Only now they flip the roles of the parents from the first one, with the last girl taking on more hero work and Bob interacting with the kids more. I do like that decision. I just kind of wish they hadn’t taken those cues so literally.
At least they had a believable, grounded reason for giving a lastra girl the spotlight instead of Bob, given that one of them was more eager to resume hero work than the other one when the main three heroes are called in by a billionaire hero fanatic about the proper strategy to legalise heroes because the initial pushback was about collateral damage to get the public on their side, they should initially push Alastor girl because her work, I mean, power causes the least of it.
And Alastor Girl rules in this film. The action sequences are creative, suspenseful and exciting. One fight is so close quarters that it’s physically uncomfortable and her motorcycle can actually come apart if she needs to stretch while driving, which is so cool. I had to have a moment when the motorcycle crashed while Bob struggling to take care of the kids. Is the big man struggling to take care of kids trope really is is this still considered funny in twenty eighteen?
I am glad that there is an understandable personal mental block for why he finds this so frustrating.
Aside from why does my wife get to be the cool superhero and not me, I am glad that there’s more interactions between Bob and the kids which was missing from the first one. And every time we see a dad just doing normal dad stuff adds to the effort of combating the plague. That is the terrible animated dad trope. But I still kind of wondered why we needed long stretches of this in a superhero movie.
If they needed Bob Bonds with kids scenes, they could have had Bob trained the kids. But then again, there’s a whole training kids to go fight and put themselves in danger thing. I get how that’s kind of a gray area. Still in the first one, Helen, scenes with the kids weren’t all home bound. They did power stuff. Here’s one thing I didn’t think would happen in this film.
These struggling to take care of a baby cliche, even a super powered baby has been done in animation a lot. And there were times during this film that I found myself thinking, hey, can we go back to the superpowered baby antics?
I’d much rather be dealing with that than Violet and her not boyfriend problem that they were spending an oddly long amount of time on for some reason that I don’t know, at least the baby scenes were funny. And there’s this raccoon incident that’s amazing. And it feels in place in a superhero movie. But the key problem with Bob stay at home dad routine is that nothing that happens in these sections of the movie ever contributes to what’s going on.
In the main story, you think having a baby with twin quirks powers would do something to upset the legalization cause? But nope, the superpowered baby thing is just for gags. It doesn’t cause a major incident. No one’s worried about their safety.
The villain doesn’t even want to study why this baby specifically has so many quirks. Powers.
Ok, I’m sorry. It is really hard not to think of my hero Accademia right now, for one, because it’s basically taken over the anime world for the past several years for a reason, because it’s really good. And it’s not hard to think of The Incredibles world being the prelude to the Hiroaki Universe. I’m sure I’m the only one who’s thought of that, however, also because the motivation of the villain in this film seems to have been loosely borrowed from the ideals of Hirokazu League of Villains. Well, one of them, anyway, there’s a bunch of characters in there and all with their own stuff going on. But that’s a big reason for why my hero Accademia has gotten so huge, aside from its very charismatic, very likable, very interesting cast hero Accademia continuously raises various questions and philosophies on what it takes to be a hero. What is a hero’s impact on society? How does that society impact hero work and crime? How does this. World adapt when 80 percent of the population is born with powers and also animal heads, which are apparently not Quirk’s, so that’s a little confusing. But the world it creates and the ideas that it raises are so fascinating.
And that’s the other thing that’s kind of missing in Incredibles two. It doesn’t raise any interesting questions or have any central theme or philosophy. The First Incredibles is dominated by multiple conversations about the nature of superheroes versus normal people. The if everyone special, the No. One is now the villain in this film, which first of all, Disney, our twist villains holding your families hostage. You can tell us anyway, the villains motivation is a potentially interesting hero universe idea. But after the villains explanation, it doesn’t come up again and it’s not reinforced by any other examples.
Helen and Bob argue briefly about helping versus following the law, and that doesn’t go anywhere. As said, the entire thing is that they’re trying to make hero work legal again. But that all goes way too smoothly because nearly everyone they talk to is totally on board with that idea.
The public is on their side. World leaders are on their side. The media is on their side. Wow. Why ever did heroes go away in the first place? They desperately needed a stronger ideological opposition to fight against not just two cops in the first 10 minutes. And this one person. Now, it’s true, the films don’t need to be about something in order to be good. However, a consistent theme does make a story feel more cohesive. And in a superhero dominated pop culture, even just in the past two months, having a little bit of a different take helps to stand out. Then again, Incredibles does still have its most important attribute, the superhero family. And that will always make it unique because Lord knows there won’t be a good Fantastic Four movie made ever. It is really easy to compare this to the first and find it lacking because the first just is that good. And even for a sequel that was probably made because the fans in the higher ups wanted it and not because they had a solid story idea for it on its own, it is still really enjoyable. I love that Helen and Bob at least feel a little bit more like a real team in this one. The kids get some time to do their own stuff. Why did it take Pixar this long to do something interesting with their freaking lamp logo? As usual, there’s a really cute short at the front. The action is superb. There’s some excellent dialogue exchanges in this film and the updated character animation is fantastic, except that for some reason Violet has these very defined wrinkles, but not Alastor girl. Is that because elastic. Oh, and of course Edna is back. So yeah, I still really enjoyed it. The only itch in the back of my brain is the thought that maybe some parents thought that the first one wasn’t family appropriate enough. So this one was deliberately planned to be simpler. That’s what Cars is for Pixar and we are done with that.
I know I technically could have counted my hero Accademia for my recommendation quota, and seriously, if you have not checked it out, I really suggest that you try at least the first two episodes for free on Crunchyroll and just see how you feel about it. But I’ve also been wanting to recommend a particular thing for a while, especially before Netflix gets rid of it. The long, long holiday is a French made mini series about a group of kids growing up in the French countryside over the course of gradual German occupation in World War Two, who, yes, we’ve shifted the tone here very drastically. What starts out as a very charming slice of life over the course of several years, the war grows ever closer and closer to the village until it lands right on top of them. And the children are given opportunities to do something useful and proactive. And it is really good. I remember initially only wanting to check it out and before I knew it, I had binged the entire five hours. It plays a lot more out like a kid’s adventure movie with substance than a depressing war movie. So tell me what you guys thought of Incredibles to comment, like subscribe, etc.. And you stay incredibly shiny, Animaniacs.
Free verse in my mind, between myself and my heart’s in the sky through the darkest night from the all.
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