Bob
2022-07-31 15:15:33 UTC
My friend and housemate Don wanted to see this award-winning movie at last night's outdoor showing in Memory Park in Newton NJ, so we went. Less than an hour into it I found myself doing astronomy, as it was a beautiful clear night and the field lights were off.
The first 20 minutes gave me the impression (which was not dispelled by the rest of it) that the makers wanted to sell it for people to buy and rewind often to watch in slow motion. You can't follow the computer-animated action, it's so fast and visually spectacular, with very fast operatic monolog to music. So it's dazzling but incomprehensible. That's OK, except for one main point, it's irrelevant anyway. Although it keeps distracting you, where it's all going is telegraphed very shortly after the opening.
What semblance of plot is discernible is trivial, and one you've seen many times before and may well know from real life, minus the allegoric magic: a well-meaning but insensitive and controlling matriarch. The conclusion avoids the predictable-but-good idea which would've been, now we'll live like normal people, what's wrong with that, huh? Instead it presents the also-predictable-but-evil Disney idea that all the magic is restored, magically.
Oh, and the setting, if you can figure it out, appears to be a rehash of Hanuka. It's people restoring their lives after some delay after an invasion, with a flame that inexplicably keeps burning, symbolic of miracle. But that too seems like a distraction from the main action in the movie.
Bob in Andover
The first 20 minutes gave me the impression (which was not dispelled by the rest of it) that the makers wanted to sell it for people to buy and rewind often to watch in slow motion. You can't follow the computer-animated action, it's so fast and visually spectacular, with very fast operatic monolog to music. So it's dazzling but incomprehensible. That's OK, except for one main point, it's irrelevant anyway. Although it keeps distracting you, where it's all going is telegraphed very shortly after the opening.
What semblance of plot is discernible is trivial, and one you've seen many times before and may well know from real life, minus the allegoric magic: a well-meaning but insensitive and controlling matriarch. The conclusion avoids the predictable-but-good idea which would've been, now we'll live like normal people, what's wrong with that, huh? Instead it presents the also-predictable-but-evil Disney idea that all the magic is restored, magically.
Oh, and the setting, if you can figure it out, appears to be a rehash of Hanuka. It's people restoring their lives after some delay after an invasion, with a flame that inexplicably keeps burning, symbolic of miracle. But that too seems like a distraction from the main action in the movie.
Bob in Andover