The Tease of Things I Don't Need

The Incredibles lives up to the hype

I finally got out to see it Sunday evening, having overcome resistance in at least one of my sons. I liked it as much as I'd expected, and Nick was pleasantly surprised.

Fun, briskly-paced, with well-realized characters taken very naturally on the run, the movie doesn't bog down for a moment yet manages to be character-driven throughout. A very human tale of superhumans, it’s neither pretentious nor condescending – neither with respect to the audience nor its subject matter.

Essentially no time is spent with origins, the filmmakers having wisely decided that such would not only bog the film down but was ultimately unnecessary. Despite having secrets from the world, as far as the viewers are concerned the characters have their hearts on their sleeves -- and it works.

While watching it I was struck by how much I hope that the people behind the upcoming Fantastic Four movie find themselves inspired by this one to tune the feel of the film and the interaction of the characters. Certainly, an FF film cannot skip the origin – it’s integral to who those characters and and the dynamics of their relationships. However, the family dynamic, enhanced and exaggerated by the "super" aspects, is very much the note an FF film should sound.

(Digression: While I wasn’t looking I see that Nip/Tuck and Charmed regular Julian McMahon has been case as Victor Von Doom in the above mentioned FF movie. Oh, and in order to reduce the whitebread feel of the original cast they’ve decided to make Alicia Masters African American, via the casting of Kerry Washington. In either case it’s not terribly important, since McMahon has been entertaining enough where I’ve seen him and Alicia’s race isn’t an important issue – though does this mean there’s a Black Puppet Master in the future somewhere..? I’ve been more concerned with the script issues that have been filtering out, though. I keep hearing the sound of train brakes failing… Ah, well, we’ll see in 2005.)

Soon after leaving it struck me how this, an animated feature, was so much more a fully-realized movie than was the CGI-soaked but nonetheless live action Van Helsing. In Van Helsing there was barely a moment where something intended to be exciting wasn’t happening, yet I didn’t find myself caring about any of the characters. In The Incredibles there’s hardly a character I didn’t have some sort of feeling for. The characters in The Incredibles were, as Mark Gibson noted, credible. In Van Helsing, by contrast, all of the characters seemed far more cartoonish, pre-packaged and two dimensional.

The Incredibles is charming and fun, and for me a generally more enjoyable film than director Bard Bird’s more manipulative, even lachrymose1999 animated hit, The Iron Giant. [Correction: A heartfelt comment from Dave Lartigue in the comments section below caused me to check into the box office The Iron Giant did and found that it did, truly, sink "like a stone" as Dave said. A $23 M or so gross box office doesn't look especially good up against a $70 M production budget, eh? Even factoring in Hollywood's notoriously suspect accounting practices, the bottom line shine on this film's box office ain't from Shinola. Checking a little farther I found it listed on one side in the #1 spot of Top 50 Underappreciated Recent Films. I allowed critical evaluations of the film - that I both enjoyed it in its way and had never heard anything bad about it - to lead me to making a rash and highly inaccurate statement. Can I get away with calling it a "critical hit?" What next? Will I refer to Scott McCloud's charming Zot! series as a runaway financial success? Thanks for the note, Dave! Oh, here's his post on The Incredibles, while I'm thinking of it.]

And, while on the general topic, here’s a little piece from the National Geographic News.