Saturday Evening Movie Post [moviegique]: ARCO

I, uh...yeah, totally let the fortnight-and-a-half get away from me, so enjoy this review of the animated family film, "Arco".

France's entry into the 2025 Carnal Olympics—I mean, Best Animated Feature Oscar is about the okayist of okay flicks to ever be presented as a child's Saturday AM feature. There were only two youngsters in our showing and one of them left about two-thirds of the way through. He was probably around seven years old, and I salute him for hanging out that long.

No, it's not bad, really.  I suspect the current 7.5 IMDB score will normalize closer to 7 because it's just not very remarkable. It's as unsurprising as an episode of "Law & Order".

The story is that in that far-flung future, a ten-year-old boy (Arco) who lives with his sister and parents in a word of floating cities, gets antsy to use their flying/time-travel suits, which is forbidden until he's twelve. He wants to see dinosaurs, though, so he puts on his sister's suit in the early morning and jumps of the edge of his city. Since the suit wasn't designed for him, he crashes to the ground and dies instantly.

No, of course not. Can you imagine? Cue the fan theories that that is what actually happened and the rest of the movie is his dying brain's last dream.

Youngsters might enjoy the sort of time paradox nonsense that have been nourishing lazy writers for decades.

Because he's an idiot, he can't make it back to dinosaur days but instead goes to the year 2075 A.D. where everyone lives in a house with their robot (who does all the work) and a girl and her baby brother are visited periodically by their parents, who work in the city and can only come home on weekends. The houses in 2075 are covered with domes, to protect them from the rain and constant fires.

It doesn't spell it out, but I can only presume this is a world where Global Warming has finally taken its toll.

Anyway, hero girl gets bored in class (all classes taught by robots) and makes up an excuse to leave and while she's out, sees Arco come crashing to the earth. She runs out to find him, and manages to steer away a menacing trio of brothers who are apparently looking for Arco.

Can I pause for a moment and say, living in an Arcology and naming your son "Arco" is like living in a bungalow and calling your son "Bungo"? I can't? Well, never mind, then.

The faces are very reminiscent of Ralph Bakshi ca. "American Pop".

Anyway, this all plays out more-or-less exactly as you'd expect, and isn't especially clever or aesthetic. (Last year's Flow was superior on both counts.) Again, it's not bad. But the only really standout part is the three brothers, who are weirdos, not really bad guys, but also vanish from the film about three-quarters of the way through. Even they're not that original, but their backstory (that they saw a rainbow from one of these time-travelers, and no one will believe them) is kind of cute, and gives the movie its only not-super-slick feel.

I think the movie is hand-drawn, which is fine, can be good, but the look didn't really grab me. Again, it's not bad, just not that interesting. Same with the voice casting: It's an all-star cast with America Ferrara, Jake Gyllenhaal, Flea, Mark Ruffalo, Andy Samberg—honestly, the only voice I "heard" was Will Ferrell's. Actually, Arco himself was played by newcomer Juliano Valdi. All fine. It's fine, I tell you!

The Boy liked it more than I did, though he really just wanted to go see any movie, and we're in the pre-awards muck.

Do I recommend it? Sure, I guess, if you need to kill ninety minutes. It won't make you mad, probably, unless you're sick of the climate change propaganda. I will give it points for suggesting we're going to find our way out of the current mess, but I'll dock it some for 1970s-style "We'll build arcologies!"

I don't know. This still looks...less than fine, tbh.

Other films I saw last month:

28 Years Later: The Bone Palace: Even wackier than its predecessor and largely nonsense, the Boy and I rather enjoyed it. Hard to recommend unless you liked its predecessor or have a serious Ralph Fiennes thing.

Send Help: Sam Raimi doing his horror thing. You'll probably like it if you liked, e.g., Drag Me To Hell. We had a schizophrenic guy laughing and yelling like Max Cady through the whole show, unfortunately.

Iron Lung: The Boy enjoyed this one more than I did, but he also knew a little more about what was going on. I had a hard time hearing the exposition at the beginning over the rest of the soundtrack, and I had a hard time understanding what the significance of anything was. I didn't hate it, but I couldn't get it into it much. The Boy really dug it.

I also saw the classics: Hard-Boiled, Tombstone and Strangers on a Train. The last, the Barbarienne and I saw at the Old Town Theater in El Segundo, which was an experience in itself, and fascinating because the older couple sitting next to us left at the end of second act becuse they were SHOCKED to find the movie had MURDER in it.

posted by Open Blogger at 07:30 PM

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