I guess if she can place the portals anywhere, she could just put them both on each side of the same wall, and then it’s effectively a hole through the wall.
I know the movie was probably already complete by this point but I thought the portal creating was done better by Doctor Strange in the Infinity Wars battle against Thanos.
Just to continue geeking out…Maybe, but she seemed to have to point at the spot where she was putting the portal, just like you would with a Portal Gun. In fact, in the game, there are times that you put portals on both sides of a wall, but you have to see both sides to shoot the portal at it. I’m not sure how she could point to the opposite side of a wall.
Like I said, I didn’t follow how she used her powers throughout the movie and maybe she put holes in walls elsewhere.
Loved it, loved it as much as the first. Not that it was without flaws, but definitely worth the wait.
They really upped Frozone’s game.
Just saw it. The only seat available was in the front row. It’s been ages since I sat that close, but at least the seat reclined way back. It’s a very, very frantic movie from up close. I think I’d like to see it again from farther away, and at about half speed.
Still, it was very good. Not quite as good as the first.
I can see Velocity’s point. Yes, Bob patiently reads to Jack-Jack to get him to go to sleep, but he winds up putting himself to sleep, and J-J even has to wake him up once. I don’t think they went too far with it; he did have his act mostly together by the end.
I found it interesting that the villains in both movies weren’t megalomaniacs, or trying to steal a lot of money, or some other traditional bad guy motivation, but they both had some grudge against superheroes themselves.
That’s one of the things I like about it. I think it was someone here who said that the original Incredibles was one of the best James Bond movies ever made. the original and this one both have something of a '60s vibe in some of the architecture and music. The antennas on the roof when Helen tracks down the Screenslaver were very '60s, but there are also electric motorcycles and maglevs, so the filmmakers are taking stuff they need from every era. At the end, after the yacht has been stopped up against the city, there were a couple fire engines visible for a couple seconds. I’d love to freeze frame and see what the designers did with them, for example.
Children are always looking around and learning from what they see. They will pick up any bad habits around them, even if you think they aren’t watching.
And by Blink in “Days of Future Past.” There were several X-Men related powers borrowed for this film: Iceman, Magneto, Blink, and Quicksilver.
It is hard to come up with a useful power that hasn’t been used before.
Mr. Incredible–a number of super-strong, partially invunerable characters.
Elastigirl–Plastic Man, Elongated Man, Mr. Fantastic.
Violet–Invisible Girl (both for the invisibility and the force field.)
Dash–Quicksilver as you mentioned, but also other speedsters including The Flash.
Jack Jack–The Human Torch, Multiple Man, The Incredible Hulk, Shadowcat, Cyclops, amongst many more.
(Voyd’s portals reminded me first of Magik’s stepping discs.)
ISTR, that’s straight out of the tutorial for the first game, when Chell can only create one color.
Well, not really. Early in the game, what happens is the other end of the portal is set up for you, someplace else. So, you’re still not tunneling right through a wall (unless there happens to be a portal right on the other side). When there’s only one portal, you can’t see through it.
She has time. Before the movie starts, there will be a confusing animated short film.
I2 was okay, but I preferred the original.
Sounds like I liked it less than anyone else here. So just a few short comments:
BAO - I’m getting exhausted by Pixar shorts that are almost exclusively obsessed with anthropomorphizing inanimate objects. Mountains, clouds, umbrellas, snow globes, playground junk, religious icons, and now food. Some of these films are quite charming, but it mostly feels derivative and cookie-cutter now. Honestly, when she ate the bun, that was the best part…until it turned out to just be a metaphor. Can’t we have real characters for a change, and ones without parent-child preoccupations? PRESTO is probably the best recent example.
INCREDIBLES 2 - First film: Supers are illegal, and the villain is someone who pretends to be their friend but is in fact pathologically obsessed with their downfall and so betrays them while they’re getting used to being back in superhero mode.
Sequel: EXACT. SAME. PLOT. It’s a superhero movie. You can’t have a villain who wants to take over the world, or has some nefarious scheme for power and glory? No, 14 years later, and they give us a variation of the same chestnut that the first film did (and did it much better).
Sure, Jack Jack is fun, Edna is aces, and the action sequences are well-done (especially with some of the new supers). But the overriding plot was such an embarrassing rehash of what we’d already seen (and incredibly predictable, too) that I just got impatient with the entire enterprise. Nowhere near Pixar’s Top 10.
I saw it last night. What I liked:
The animation was great, especially in the action sequences. Some of them (like with Underminer’s machine) somehow felt more real than reality, if you know what I mean. I think it’s mostly from an extremely high level of detail, but it’s hard to put a finger on it.
The characters show real growth. Not just the main characters like Helen, Bob, and Violet (“Is she having an adolescence?”), but even the minor characters like Voyd (who’s getting much more confident) and Crush (“Nobody ever ask to uncrush before”).
The trailers didn’t ruin anything. In fact, they created or modified some of the footage for the trailers, just to make it work better. I wish more movies did that: A few extra seconds out of two hours won’t break the budget.
I loved, loved, loved the part with New Math. Yeah, yeah, Bob is confused and upset at math being changed… but then, he goes and learns it anyway, because damnit, he’s a grown-up, and if a middle schooler can understand this, he can, and his kid needs his help. I hope that inspires a lot of the parents that make similar complaints.
What I didn’t like:
Dash was way underused. All he actually uses his power for is making dramatic entrances/exits and for changing clothes quickly. But when he goes chasing off after the mole machine, for instance… Violet catches up to him? How?
Like many others have said, the villain’s identity was telegraphed much more strongly than it should have.
I’m not entirely happy that all three villains so far have been metatechnologists. Yeah, there are some good ones, too, like Edna and whoever made the Incredibile, but it still feels a little like “nerds bad, jocks good”.
And I also thought that the short was a bit incomprehensible.
Overall, I though the movie wasn’t as good as the original (which isn’t saying much, given how great the original was), but it was still very good.
I think you’re overstating things a bit. In the first movie, Syndrome appears initially as a random throwaway character in a flashback. So the surprise is not “apparently good character is actually evil”, it’s “apparently throwaway character is back, and is the big bad”.
They’re certainly not polar opposites, but there’s also not carbon copies.
Movie one: Mirage’s cover story was that she had a few tasks that she needed a particular super to handle a few difficult problems for her; the real plan was using supers to test and improve a killing machine, with that killing machine then being used as a threat, so that one particular person (Syndrome) could set himself up to be a beloved (and only) superhero.
Movie two: Winston, entirely sincerely, wants to make superheroes legal again, and starts a publicity campaign to do so - his sister hijacks his plan, with the goal of making all superheroes permanently illegal.
All the plans have in common is superheroes are involved in them, in some way - but the goals and methods are quite different. Evelyn wants supers to be illegal and hated; Syndrome wants one super (himself) to be legal and adored. Evelyn is using a campaign to make supers legal as a cover; Syndrome is not. Evelyn is using a sincere ly pro-super person (her brother) as an unwitting tool. Syndrome has an apparently pro-super person (Mirage) as a willing and knowing collaborator.
In case it’s not clear, I’m agreeing with MaxtheVool and elaborating on what he said.
Of course it’s not exactly the same, just like GOLDFINGER and A VIEW TO A KILL are not exactly the same. But the overriding principle–villain has deep-seeded grudge against supers so exploits them to advance their own agenda–is one that you’d be hard-pressed to find in almost any other superhero movie out there (and there are a ton). Syndrome was a psychopath and far more destructive in the corpses he left in his wake, but their common thread is still “Revenge shall be mine for what the superheroes did to my life” and that is such a relatively rare* chip for a villain to carry in a superhero movie that using it twice consecutively is particularly conspicuous.
So that itself makes them more similar to each other, despite the mechanisms of plot. I found the “This time its personal” motivation tiresome and redundant, and the fact that after 14 years, they could only think of going back to that well again felt incredibly lazy.
(*For the sake of accuracy, I revisited all the Marvel and DC movies and found only 2 that might qualify as “Superheroes ruined my life so I’m specifically exacting my revenge on them” just twice: IRON MAN 3 and CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR)
But in the story - it makes sense.
It’s been 14 years for you and I (the viewer) - its been, what, 6 weeks (?) for the participants in the movie.
So, we have ‘superheros illegal’ - something happens such that the superheros can’t save the parents - (I’m thinking this was Syndrome) - superheros are back - bad person wants to prevent that from happening.
Its been very little time ‘in world’ - and it lines up reasonably well for a story line.
True, but that was still a creative choice by the filmmakers. Nobody compelled them to make a film that picked up literally the minute where the last one left off. They could’ve had a few years pass where people slowly start getting used to supers in the world and then have them face a criminal of particular notoriety or ill intent.
The whole political angle was almost treated as an after-thought at the end of the last movie (just a “we’ll let the politicians figure it out” hand wave) but it becomes, needlessly, the central theme of this one. And to what end? The Parrs are involved in even more incidents that are massively destructive than the previous film. So the film pretends to be about it, but it’s only a McGuffin, a plot device to artificially add conflict rather than a theme the film actually explores. Again, lazy, imho.
I think a lot of the genius of Pixar films over the years was their ability to find some simple idea and then explore it to unexpected degrees. Toy Story isn’t just talking toys having adventures, they have a hierarchy, and meetings, rivalries, they spy on Andy opening Christmas presents to protect their own status, and in the sequels they fear obsolescence when Andy grows up and they’re left behind. Those things are contained within the premise, but it takes creativity to find them.
So what unexplored avenues are there about superheroes? I remember a comic book from years ago called Damage Control. It was about a company that specialized in cleaning up the damage from the big fights between heroes and villains. That’s the kind of idea that grows out of the premise but hadn’t really been addressed. I think that’s what The Incredibles was going for; the resentment that some people would feel for these famous, strong, adored heroes who were just lucky to be born with powers. I wish they’d found some newer ground to cover in the sequel, but after thousands of heroes over 70 years, I can see how that would be tough to find.
What would you all have rather seen them do in the sequel? They could have gone the opposite of the original; after defeating Syndrome superheroes become legal again, and the Parr’s newfound celebrity turns them into blasé jerks or stretches them too thin (especially Helen) when everybody wants a piece of them, but stories like that have been done before.