STRANGE WORLD (2022) ★
My metric for judging children's movies is simple: they should appeal to children. This seems like an easy standard, but I've noticed in recent children's films an unfortunate tendency to veer into storylines that are too complicated for a 42 year-old, let alone a grade schooler. Such is the case with Disney's latest animated fiasco, "Strange World," a film so overladen with political and eco-conscious themes that even the most hardened D.C. lobbyist would blanche at watching it.
I won't summarize the storyline of this one, simply because I couldn't follow it. It has something to do with a family discovering an unlikely form of bioelectrical energy, which mysteriously loses its usefulness and needs a replacement. The adventure that follows is similar to Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, from which Disney's source material is taken. Nothing wrong with that in principle, but "Strange World" abuses Verne's 1864 science fiction concept by adding all sorts of unnecessary flab in the form of contemporary hot-potato social issues. The Clade Family is the source of the unwanted fat: Jake Gyllenhaal plays Searcher Clade, father of Jabouki Young-White's Ethan Clade, and father and son are really irritating people. Searcher thinks his father, Jaeger Clade (Dennis Quaid) is dead, having lost him as a child in one of his family's treks through uncharted regions of the film's fictional fantasyland of Avalonia. (Spoiler alert, they find Jaeger. He's alive, though to uphold Disney's longstanding tradition, maybe he shouldn't be.)
The real source of annoyance in this film is its handling of Ethan's character. Disney decided to make the sixteen year-old gay, and with a big crush on a local boy, which is perfectly fine. This is meant to be one of the "woke" components of the Clade family, along with Searcher being married to a black woman named Meridian, played by Gabrielle Union. Ethan's sexuality is fog-horned to the audience via an introductory scene in which he flirts with the local in question, and I'm led to believe his feelings will be incorporated into the story somehow. They aren't. At no other point during the movie's main events does Ethan's sexuality factor in. So why bother introducing it? What interest does a child have in knowing that Ethan is gay? If it isn't finessed into the plot, there's no way of contextualizing it. If it's superfluous for Ethan, it's even more so for his target audience. Disney's writers cracked a few eggs, but skipped the omelet.
There's also a scene midway through in which the main characters sit around playing cards. The writers used this incredibly dull five minutes to give Ethan a way to tell the audience that a story doesn't need a villain, which is an elliptical way of explaining why Disney neglected to include one here. (Pro Tip: A story does need a villain for the sake of generating conflict, because without one you have "Strange World.") It's a dumbfounding and tedious scene, and I imagined millions of pre-pubescent boys and girls squirming in boredom beside their sleeping parents. Then I realized that the general public isn't the intended audience for this movie -- Disney is.
Disney made "Strange World" as a test pilot for their new "message movie" format, and the only people who stand to learn anything (and presumably be entertained by their revelations, if by nothing else) are Disney employees. They wanted the message to carry in the form of a movie for children, but couldn't be bothered to extend even a modest gesture to them. The core message of "Strange World" is one of environmentalism, and in the final act it becomes clear that the Clade Family are emissaries of wind-turbine energy. This is a bizarre angle, especially when the main adventure is premised on Searcher's need to re-up his bio-electrical energy grid. Since when is electricity environmentally harmful?
I'm not buying any of the supposed narrative engines here. So little effort is put into substantiating the political niches that they become, in an ironic twist of fate, insulting. Meridian Clade is barely in the movie, and gets virtually no screen time beyond an initial domestic scene with Searcher and Ethan. She spends all of her time chauffeuring everyone around in a weird underground exploration machine. Again, why cast a black actor as an animated black woman, only to relegate her to the most minor role as little more than a glorified taxi driver? To me this seemed, well, racist.
There is no saving "Strange World." It is a suspense-free tale about how a man reunites with his long-lost father in a not-so-shared quest to rediscover an unnecessary self-sustaining source of infrastructure energy, a tortuous movie to subject children to. I envision parents of the future threatening their cubs with something like, "If you don't eat your vegetables, you're watching 'Strange World' after dinner."
--- Bill Fontaine
