Maybe I’m just not seeing it, but I’m surprised there’s not a thread on the newest Disney movie yet.
I took my boys (12 and 6) to see it over the weekend, and we all loved it. I was a bit put off by the ending – it seemed a little too pat to me – but otherwise it was a great film. And I thought the visuals were amazing.
Early returns are great – it was the top movie in weekend receipts, with more than $56 million in the U.S.
I think the boys and I now have a new way of fist-bumping after seeing the movie.
Moonfamily saw it yesterday (Sunday) and thoroughly enjoyed it. My son generally avoids movies – sensitive type who doesn’t care to have his buttons pushed – but BH6 reeled him in with perfect timing, i.e.,
he was already hooked by the time the kid’s older brother died.
A review that especially resonated called it “familiar” and that’s what it is. I won’t say totally cliche – although they certainly are sprinkled throughout – but everything feels reminiscent of movies before it. Kinda like how Super 8 feels Spielbergian. (The JJ Abrams one, not the snuff film with Nic Cage.)
We saw it at a theater in Hollywood that really dolls up the screening (laser show, music, etc.) and the place was filled with young children. The roar of their laughter in predictable places was something to behold. But it has enough drama to be a hit with parents, too.
The movie snob in me kinda checked out during the somewhat predictable third act, but there were still a couple of twists that made it work for me.
My biggest disappointment was Hiro finding the chip in Baymax’s fist, and then
building a new Baymax. That really felt wrong to me … it cheapened the original Baymax’s sacrifice. Besides, Hiro had a “superpower” once he got his microbots back.
I wanted Baymax to turn around in the void and shoot his rocket-fist away from the opening, thereby pushing them all toward the opening. Ah well.
Yeah, I dunno. On the one hand, rebuilding Betamax (do we really need spoiler boxes in here?) (sorry, he just became Betamax for me, indicating that I Am Old) was a bit too much of an easy happy ending. On the other hand, I think they released a giant puff of dust in the theatre at that moment, aimed directly at my eyes. I dunno, they got all watery for some reason.
I enjoyed it a great deal; it was more “action” than “comedy”, IMO, with quite a few of the funny bits spoiled by the trailers, but it was still a ton of fun. I don’t know if there’s really a sequel in it–at least so far as a proper big screen sequel. I can totally see a spinoff animated series, though, which’ll be fun for the kiddies but probably not enough to keep my attention.
Off-topicish: Did anybody else get the trailer for Paddington? While I could do without the gross-out humor, it’s still an adorable, tiny, anthropomorphic bear having adventures. I dunno, I suspect I’ll fall for it. Heck, even the gross-out humor had some genuinely funny bits, mostly in his reaction.
ETA: Oh, I assume everyone got the “Feast” short beforehand. Wonderful, though how that dog didn’t become too fat to move rather early on… I didn’t care for the ending, but I know my pathological dislike of babies isn’t normal, so it was the expected feel good ending. Besides that, if you’re a dog whose greatest pleasure is table scraps (and who won’t mind a) all of the horrible things a baby will generally do to a dog and b) having your people completely forget you exist other than the bare minimum of feeding you), I can see the appeal of having a creature in the world who is notable mostly, aside from screaming, for making a gigantic clustermuck out of meals and putting most of them on the floor.
I thought Feast did a great job of showing what life must be like for a dog. I knew there’d be a baby eventually because nothing makes hungry dogs happier than a kid dropping goldfish around the house. Or meatballs, apparently.
The Paddington trailer was terrible. Some of the others (Tomorrowland, Inside Out) looked intriguing. I too assume we all got kind of the same ones.
As to the movie, I didn’t really know entirely what it was about going in. I think that made it even better. I knew there was a squishy robot and a kid stuffed him in armor at some point, but I was thinking it was more like Lilo & Stitch, where a precocious kid came across something a little odd, not Iron Man Jr… or Phineas grown up. I really liked it and cried at least twice, which I hate doing in public. I went with two kids, one of whom kept checking to see if I was crying. The other was too busy silently weeping to check on me. Even though Disney movies tend to be on the short side, I sometimes still get a little “is it over yet?”, but the time flew. And I was surprised at the villain’s identity, which always gives a movie an extra few points from me.
My only complaint was the whole - robot acting drunk cause his batteries are failing scene- went on far too long. And, it bugged me that we knew he was running on Lipo batteries at that point. Hiro’s brother would have certainly put in a low voltage protection that would simply shut baymax off when the batteries got to a certain level.
Oddly enough, it didn’t bother me when baymax had and endless supply of power to fly and shoot rockets at the end. That was after the upgrade montage, so he could have been nuclear powered by that point.
But yeah - loved the movie. We were a little over 1/2 through when my 5 year old daughter leaned over to me in the theater and said, “Dad, we’re totally buying this”.
I saw it with my 8 and 10 year olds and we all really enjoyed it. About half way in I leaned over to my son and whispered “The bad guy is the professor, or maybe his brother” - so he was impressed with me – but it’s just because I’ve Seen Movies.
I totally did not recognize Scott [30 Rock’s] Adsit’s voice as Baymax. That was a nice job.
Saw with the 10 year old boy and 12 year old girl this weekend. We loved it. The story didn’t break lots of new ground but it sure was fun. Like others here we objected to Baymax not holding on to the rocket and shooting his fist into the void to launch them out of the vortex. It seems like after all that happened they would have figured out a solution. Besides that we really liked it. The fart scene was far, far funnier than it had any right to be.
My fanwank for this is that if he had shot his fist off into the void, there wouldn’t have been enough momentum to get them to the portal. The rockets are in the fist, so if you shoot it out into space, there goes all your force. Also, by leaving the rest of his body behind, the rockets in the fist are pushing less mass.
Did you all stay through the credits? I usually do but I was ready to bail out midway though. However, it so happened that I did & got quite the surprise.
I dunno. I liked the movie and I thought it was good. But I didn’t think it was great. Not as good as Wreck-It Ralph for example.
There was a pretty minimal story here: a boy and his friends become superheroes. Whatever character growth occurred was minor and covered in a single scene. And the characters had no real depth - I think the deepest character was Fred.
Callaghan didn’t really work as a villain. He had supposedly been this great guy who turned evil because Krei killed his daughter. Okay but why was he attacking anyone other than Krei? He had no real reason to attack Hiro or chase the gang around the city.
And keep in mind that his daughter’s death had occurred before the movie started. So the nice guy Callaghan we saw in the lab was already a villain. Which makes his actions in those scenes seem strange in retrospect.
Was there something in the video that established when the portal accident happened in relation to the movie’s start?
There was some amount of time gap between the start and the presentation so couldn’t it have happened then?
Anyway, my two quibbles are:
While it was obvious from the start that Callaghan was the villain, the method of his madness doesn’t really make sense. Hiro is going to come to his lab. He’ll have unfettered access to the technology and if, that night, he’d simply asked to take the neurotransmitter and a couple microbots home Hiro would certainly have allowed it. Why the need to fake his own death and then set up a presumably expensive and difficult to build without access to your money, manufacturing site for the microbots.
What exactly was the set up for the portal experiment. When they did the demo with the hat the guy just tossed it through one side and it came out the other to be caught by a guy in a scissor lift. For the human test they put her in a specially constructed vehicle and LAUNCHED it through the one side with nothing to catch it on the other. She was going to come out and fall dozens of fee to the floor. Maybe that’s why she needed a special vehicle.
I really liked it so these are not particularly serious complaints.
Agreed. Though I’m not sure that Wreck-It Ralph has really done all that well on the financial/popularity scale. I sense that it’s more like a cult hit.
To some extent, I think of that as a positive. Movies like X-Men: First Class or Star Trek: JJ Abrams failed for me because they tried to pack too many characters and developments into a limited space.
In this movie, for example, it seemed pretty clear from the art style that Tron girl was designed to be Hiro’s love interest. But they didn’t even get within a 10 mile radius of approaching that topic, whereas in Star Trek, we were dealing with both Kirk and Spock’s dating mishaps, besides everything else that was going on.
Granted, most people liked Star Trek, whereas I thought it blew ass, so my criticism doesn’t necessarily count for much. But personally, I would rather the writers tackle as much of the story as actually makes sense for a 90 minute movie and save other developments for later installments.
Thinking it over, it is possible the portal accident happened off camera during the movie. There was the period between when Hiro first visited the lab and when he went to the science exhibit. He obviously spend some time developing his magnetic robots. The portal accident could have occurred during this time.
But it must have occurred before the science exhibit. That was the night that Callaghan stole the robots so he was already a villain. And that means that Callaghan was already evil at the science exhibit. But when we saw him he being friendly to Hiro and welcoming to the university - despite the fact that he was planning on robbing Hiro and burning down the exhibit building an hour later.
And Callaghan’s argument with Krei in the exhibit hall was far too mild when you consider that Callaghan was actually angry enough at Krei that he was planning on murdering him and destroying his company.
Plot twists can be good. But to be good, a plot twist should be something which makes you realize that the signs had been there all along. A bad plot twist is when you feel the writer just pulled something out of nowhere.
If we work back from what we see in the film, I think the case that would best fit Callaghan’s behavior would be that:
The accident happened long enough ago that Callaghan had mostly come to peace with it.
He had no plans to become a supervillain until after he saw the microbots and Krei. During that scene, he was still just a contented professor who was mostly at peace with what had happened. But then, presumably, a few minutes after that scene he thought back on how Krei had tried to sneak off with the microbot and recalled what a dishonest crook the guy actually was, that flared up doubts about how “accidental” the accident had been given the potential for poor oversight and cost-cutting that Krei may have done. And then in that moment of anger, he realized that with the microbots, he could do anything he could imagine…and that set everything off on its path.
Presumably, he could have gone for revenge in his free time and kept living his life the way he had been, but he felt that he wouldn’t have been able to act normal, and people would have tried to stop him. Making a clean break would give him more freedom to work on the scheme.
It doesn’t have to be a multi-element plot. But the writers here barely addressed the plot elements they did have. They did everything with a two scene approach. One scene to bring up a problem and another scene to solve the problem. One scene where Tadashi worries Hiro is wasting his intelligence. Then one scene in the lab and Hiro has decided to go to college. One scene where the group decides to be superheroes. Then one montage scene where they accomplish that. One scene where Hiro wants to kill Callaghan. Then one scene where he realizes that was wrong and everyone forgives him. And it kept going like that. There was nothing the characters had to struggle with and slowly overcome during the course of the movie.
Compare this to the character development of Wreck-It Ralph or Stitch or Shrek or MegaMind or Ginormica or Gru. These characters didn’t have all their issues resolved in the next scene.