Summer recipe: Incredibles 2. How to transform a brilliant story into a warmed-up Disney superhero movie
Try it at home with the film of your choice and change it into the perfect Disney summer tentpole.
Difficulty: **
Expense:*****
Originality: *
Calories: *****
Ingredients:superheroes, but it works with anything, really. Try it with intergalactic conflicts.
Directions:take a film and make it again. No need of a new plot, just make it bigger, louder, more colorful, more crowded, more repetitive. To spice things up, put a girl at the centre of it. Your audience will love it and ask for more... Or not?
Here the detailed instructions.
More colors.Remember the honored animation tradition of differentiating color tones for different part of the story, to highlights its various moods? In the first Incredibles, superheroes golden age appeared exactly like that, sun-kissed gold, while Bob's life as employee of the insurance company was literally grey; by contrast, his secret adventure on the island was dominated by reds, like his super hero costume and his newly found passion for life. Now, forget about all that: just go full on pop (sleek mid-century style and improved character design can almost make up for it.)
More super heroes.Add a bunch of them and give each one a line or two. To create a sort of animated Avengers team that may be useful for sequels and who knows, maybe spinoffs too. Who are they? Don't know, but they have superpowers, that's all that matters. What do they do? See next point.
More fights and action sequences.We remember the first film for the spectacular chase and confrontation on the island, in which each character had his moment, and the Final Big Fight in the city centre where they all join forces. Now there are so many of them, bigger and louder, with so many characters involved, starting from the very beginning, that I soon experienced that familiar feeling I was introduces by The Avengers: the fighting fatigue. And it's a pity because all that noise makes it hard to remember Elasti-Girl's two really spectacular action sequences, the frantic motorcycle race against timed the stroboscopic fistfight with Screenslaver.
A villain with no credible motive except to piss off the good guys.Syndrome, the rejected superheroes fan boy, made perfect sense in wanting to make everybody super through science and technology. Actually very progressive and egalitarian... until he started killing off superheroes, of course. But Evelyn Deavor? She's angry at our heroes because they didn't protect her father from the burglars who killed him. Shouldn't she be angry at that anti super law that stop them from helping people? Or at the actual killers, the burglars? Her logic is obscure.
She had momentum as Screenslaver exploiting and highlighting our electronic screen addiction. But that promising point gets forgotten along the way. She has the power of hypnotizing everybody and rule the entire world... instead she decides to use it to make a giant yacht crash into the city harbor? It doesn't make much sense. It reminds me of another super villain from, you guessed, The Avengers: Thanos, the guy with the magic glove that gives him absolute powers to rule the universe according to his wildest dreams... and to fix its overpopulation problem he can't think of anything better than to randomly wipe out half of the global population. Not what I call an evil genius.
More of the same.Take every original idea from the first film and use it again, in the exact same way and order, thus creating a formula that will allow to produce endless sequels. Let's not surprise the audience with anything new, too risky. Just substitute the hero with a heroine so the film will look new and PC.
In this case: super heroes are illegal because perceived to make more damage than good, so they go in hiding and feel frustrated, parent gets a call from a mysterious billionaire fan of super heroes, goes on successful missions, other parent at home struggles with more mundane task of raising a family, until visits Edna for help and gets a new super costume, in the meantime the first parent finds out it was a trap all along but it's too late, family comes to the rescue, big fighting sequence in the city centre with explosions and super powers galore, older daughter bravely approaches Tony, the boy of her dreams (yes, the very same one).
As with Star Warsepisode VII, we don't know if we should call it a sequel or a remake.
More of everything.In the first film, Jack Jack had a single gag, less than a minute long, and it was memorable. Here it was natural to expand on that, but instead of evolving from there it seems they simply repeated that gag over and over (with dad, the siblings, the uncle, the auntie...). And while I found Jack Jack's hilarious fight with the raccoon the highlight of the film, it started getting old by the umpteenth time I saw him disappear, turn into a monster, multiply...
Similarly in Star Wars: in the original film we had the Death Star, in episode VI and VII we got... bigger Death Stars; at the beginning of the old trilogy the bad guys showed its power destroying a planet, in the new one they did it destroying fiveplanets. It can go on and on...
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Final recommendations.Incredibles 2is a rich plate, a feast for the eye, and all the ingredients are dispensed generously. While perfectly executed by master chef Brad Bird, the recipe lacks originality and relies too much on warmed-up plot points and gags. The redundancy and predictability of the result can fill you up pretty quickly, and leave you bloated and sleepy. The deja-vue feeling doesn't help. Best enjoyed with a gin and tonic or, if you're under age, a big Coca Cola.