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The Incredibles
The Incredibles 2004
It’s Friday evening and I’ve been looking forward to watching The Incredibles again. This has got to be one of the best superhero movies that I’ve ever seen, and next to Batman this is one of Jena’s favorite superheroes as well and she loved the movie from start to finish. While the Incredibles aren’t based on any existing comic books, they epitomize the classic Superhero types and of course they are very strongly inspired by the Fantastic Four. Some people even go so far as to say they almost directly copied them. Instead of Mr. Fantastic Reed Richards, there is Elastigirl Helen Parr. The Invisible Woman Sue Storm is replaced by the daughter Violet. Those two are pretty much direct copies, especially Violet since I’ve never heard of any other superhero that pairs invisibility with forcefields. The baby Jack Jack has a brief touch of the Human Torch’s powers and Dash has a little bit of the Torch’s personality. And Mr. Incredible is the brawn of the team as is The Thing, but those connections are a bit more of a stretch. And it’s not like one can’t count dozens of superheroes from different publishers that are essentially the same. I personally don’t think it’s a big detraction of the movie and I’m not even sure many people other than a few fanboys on message boards. In fact I think it’s kind of funny when I read that parts of the Fantastic Four script was changed because it was too close to this movie.
The movie starts off in the past, with an interview of all the heroes talking about what they would like out of life, and it turns out later on that later in life they all end up wanting the opposite of what they want at that moment in time. Like Mr. Incredible says that he’d like to take a break from heroing, and yet fifteen years later, all he wants to do is to be a hero again. It also shows the heroes in their prime with a great action setpiece filled with a lot of funny bits like the obligatory cat in the tree and of course there’s the standard superhero rescues like a bank robbery, a train disaster, and the kid sidekick. And yet there’s enough of a twist for all of these to make them feel fresh, even the kid fan that goes on to screw things up. I noticed this especially with the train scene and there’s that quick moment where Mr. Incredible braces himself for the train impact. It’s not the typical steeling himself that usually accompanies these moments where the hero grits his teeth and prepares for impact, but instead he turns his head and closes his eyes. He’s prepared for it, but in a much more realistic way. I also really like the subtle nod to one of my favorite films when Mr. Incredible is trying to remember Incrediboy’s real name and starts off by calling him Brody, which was the name of Jason Lee’s character in Mallrats, he also happens to voice Incrediboy and later Syndrome. And it ends with the wedding of Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl.
It then goes on to touch upon the public’s distrust of superheroes and their love for litigation, which causes the government to discontinue their superhero program and place all of the current heroes into basically the superhero protection program. Jump fifteen years into the future and Mr. Incredible is a pencil pusher who’s gained a lot of weight and Elastigirl is now a happy homemaker with three children. Violet who is the shy, unsure of herself teenager who can become invisible, Dash is the hyper troublemaker with superspeed. The powers feel in this context feel a lot more symbolic than just being copies of the Fantastic Four. The introduction of both of the kid’s powers feel pretty organic, interesting, and funny.
Throughout this movie, there is what feels like a great blend of drama, humor, and action. The emotional scenes feel earned, and the action scenes are all exciting. My favorite of the action scenes are the two infiltration scenes with Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl alternately breaking into Syndrome’s inner lair. It’s not too often that someone with Mr. Incredible’s power sneaks in through the back rather than going into a frontal assault through the front doors. It’s also rare to see a hero get to where it feels like he’s truly been defeated. It’s a very subtle, yet fantastic moment after Mr. Incredible thinks that his family is dead and you can just hear him quietly sobbing in the background.
I can go on and on about what this movie does right, from the hilarious Edna Mode, to the great voicework of the kid actor playing Dash. I especially love the amount of joy and enthusiasm he has when he first gets to let loose with his superpowers on the volcanic island. Even the subplot of Mirage turning against Syndrome to help Mr. Incredible. And I’ve been thinking about it for a while, there’s just not much that this movie does wrong. My only question is that the interim fifteen years are rather glossed over. There seemed to be an awful lot of superheroes out there, and once they all go away, things just carry on as normal? Were there any supervillain uprisings, or did the supervillains pretty much go away too with no superheroes to pit themselves against? And if things were perfectly calm during those times, then does the world really need the superheroes to return? And even though I’ve heard a lot of people clamoring for a sequel, especially more than a sequel to Cars or Monsters Inc., but I’m honestly not sure what kind of story they could tell in a sequel and have it come out as complete as this movie. I get the feeling if they tried to create a sequel, it would end up just being much more of an action setpiece. Maybe if they set the movie several years in the future again and have the children ready to set out on their own, but it doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen anytime soon, if ever. Regardless, this is a fantastic movie and will be one of my favorites for a long time. This was a movie that I devoured when I got it on DVD. In fact, I believe several of my favorite moments talked about in the film’s commentary or special features. Which is something I don’t explore as much as I used to. I was even able to get Jena to talk about this movie for a little while, check it out right below. This Tuesday has a special bonus review of Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths instead of my usual blog, keep an eye out for it. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.
Captain America: The First Avenger
Captain America 2011
Ahh, my first chance to watch one of the recent crop of Marvel Studios movies and I kick it off with Captain America: The First Avenger, having just watched the 1990 Captain America movie a few days earlier. I was actually a little surprised at how many similarities the two movies had, although I suppose it’s very possible that the similarities are the ones taken directly from the comic book origins. As I mentioned in the last post I’m not very familiar with Captain America, I’ve only seen him in now a couple movies. But the origin is pretty much the same, the only difference is in this movie they used special effects to make the jump between scrawny Steve Rogers to buff Captain America that much more effective. I’m reminded of the scene in the first Spiderman movie with Tobey Maguire, except I believe they didn’t use special effects for that scene, they just shot skinny Tobey at the beginning of the shoot before he started his training and buff Tobey at the end of the shoot where he bulked up naturally. In this movie they have Chris Evans’ face on a short 90 pound wimpy looking kid. My wife was horribly distracted by this, in her words “they put his face on a midget”. I wasn’t put off by it and I thought the special effects for this were excellent and didn’t fall into the uncanny valley.
As far as the similarities to the Cap origin I just watched, there’s the same “It’s Alive” chamber moment of transformation along with sparks going everywhere and the Nazi spy killing the German doctor who created the procedure. The Red Skull was once again the initial recipient of the super soldier serum with some pretty harsh side effects, although in this version he was already a megalomaniac who wanted the procedure done on his own terms and damn the consequences. And of course there’s also the being frozen for a few dozen years, but in this movie it’s only barely touched upon in the beginning of the movie and used at the end as basically a trailer for the Avengers movie coming out later this year. Nearly this entire movie takes place during WWII instead of during the present. I was looking forward to seeing how this Captain America adjusted to the present day, but instead that will have to wait until the Avengers. And I just recently read a news story that confirms this theory that Captain America will be the main focus of the new Avengers movie.
The one subplot in this movie that was new to me was the fact that the Captain America image was created as war propaganda to help sell war bonds. I thought this was a fun sidestory, but I also thought it could have been cut down a bit. It doesn’t make as much sense to me that they would waste someone with his abilities in the publicity racket instead of immediately putting him on the front lines. I know that his picture was in the paper, but I felt that at that period in time he could have done a few events, then they could have easily switched to a look-a-like while sending the real Cap to do some actual fighting.
The Red Skull was the villain in this movie and he’s essentially super-Hitler with no face. He was the leader of his own sub-organization called Hydra, with their own super-goofy salute which they thankfully only used once maybe twice, and his goal was to take over the entire world. The other main thing that bugged me a little about this movie was the high-tech excuse for PG-13. That is, instead of using real guns, The Red Skull found this magic cube that let him create magic guns that disintegrated people instead of putting bloody holes in them. I know why this was done: it let them get away with killing a bunch of people by disintegration because that’s sci-fi violence instead of bloody violence. I would have rather seen non-blood violence using real guns rather than blue-flashy exploding guns. It also let them not use Nazi paraphernalia and instead have high-tech faceless soldiers that the audience can then dehumanize so it’s ok if they die by the dozens.
There is one other thing that I knew about Captain America that wasn’t covered in any of the movies that I’ve watched: Captain America’s sidekick Bucky is one of the few comic book deaths that haven’t been resurrected in some way… at least for a very very long time. So when they revealed that Steve’s friend’s name was Bucky I knew that he was going to die in this movie. And that scene as an action scene was pretty good. As a death scene, it was pretty cliche. There were a couple other cliche comic book movie moments but they were thankfully few and brief. There was the slow motion jumping over an explosion shot, and the girl who wistfully looks up into the sky as the Hero flies away to great peril.
I really liked the costume design in this movie as well. Both the propaganda ready original costume and the combat ready revamped costume worked well for what their purposes were and the shield looked and was used pretty well and fairly convincingly. My side character of this movie was Mr. Stark. He didn’t have a lot of screen presence but he was used enough and his name was used just enough to really catch my interest in him and made me wish there was more of him. Not enough there for his own spin-off movie, but I would love it if they used another Marvel hero from this era that featured him as a side character again. He’s obviously similar to Iron Man‘s Tony Stark, but different enough to be an interesting character. I’m curious how popular he is to other fans of the movie, as I haven’t read hardly anything about this movie outside of Twitter comments and other similar comments from people who liked the movie. And I really liked the movie, my complaints that I’ve mentioned in this blog are all pretty minor. While I was watching the movie I was hooked through and through, it’s not flawless, but it’s an excellent movie for sure. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.
Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 