Watched: 01/30/2018
Format: Amazon Streaming
Viewing: First
Decade: 2010's
It's been forever since The Incredibles came out, and I really wanted to see this one in the theater and just never found the time.
Incredibles 2 picks up at the exact same moment the predecessor ended, maybe a minute before - and that seemed, honestly, like an odd choice. Like... hey, a lot of time has passed for us here, maybe say it's been a couple months? Get some traction under The Parr family before slingshotting them off to the next major life change...
Nonetheless, the story works. Helen Parr/ ElastiGirl is recruited by a billionaire who wants to see "Supers" legalized again, while Bob stays home with the kids - finding that being there for his kids is a whole new set of dad-challenges.
I assume you've all seen this movie so I won't belabor it too much. I was super impressed with how everything stayed on model from the first film, but they found new nuance to character movement and expression with the intentionally broad designs evoking mid-century cartoon aesthetic.
I'm not a huuuge fan of mind-control stories in my super-tales - and I appreciate that they've been put in hiatus in a lot of the books I've been reading lately - but I suppose it's a novel concept for folks not living behind walls of longboxes. It just made all of this pretty predictable from the minute the bad guy started up their scheme.*
But, yeah, overall hugely enjoyable family fun stuff. Terrific action sequences - I mean, I was doing that cackling I do during well-executed superhero action when ElastiGirl saved the train and again when Mr. Incredible asked the Krusher if he could un-crush stuff.
I really, really regret not seeing it on the big screen, but, lesson learned, I guess.
Also, if you don't want to hear Holly Hunter's voice all day... I don't even know. I would even get an Alexa if it was voiced by Holly Hunter. And, Hollywood, geez... just put Katherine Keener in more stuff, already. She's so good and I miss her, and a cartoon Keener isn't enough.
*and, frankly, the Purple Man storyline in Jessica Jones is the likeliest conclusion of mind-control, and that's hard to ignore as an adult viewer. Like, hey, I know that's dark, and this is Pixar, but no one made them go there.
2 comments:
I liked The Incredibles 2 but it never reached the heights of the first movie for me. Mind you the first movie was borrowing heavily from Watchmen and early Fantastic Four stories so that's some pretty good source material.
All mind control/mind wipe stories have been ruined by Infinity Crisis.
I don't know how true this is - but supposedly Brad Bird doesn't read comics and had no concept of any of that. I mean, who knows? Given the "Superman" bit in Iron Giant, I think we all have reason to be skeptical of that claim. But I *do* think smart people looking at the superhero formula will come to many of the same conclusions (there's a reason we don't encourage masked vigilantism IRL) and use the same logic to tell stories as a sort of convergent narrative evolution.
I just get tired of the terribly predictable beats of mind control stories and nobody losing it over the implications. They even mention it in the movie but were clearly not willing to deal with things at that scale.
And, yeah, I'm trying to parse if you meant Identity Crisis or Infinity Crisis, because Infinity Crisis certainly opened the "mind wipe" can of worms - leading into Identity Crisis.
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