
Onward movie review: the Pixar road goes ever on
Don’t let the Pixar curve throw you: familiar this quest may be, but it’s full of magic and wonder and humor and melancholy, and set in a fully realized fantasy world. Not a masterpiece but very good.
film criticism by maryann johanson | since 1997
Don’t let the Pixar curve throw you: familiar this quest may be, but it’s full of magic and wonder and humor and melancholy, and set in a fully realized fantasy world. Not a masterpiece but very good.
Our expectations are a lot higher now after the unexpectedly wildly inventive first movie… and this sequel delivers, digging with witty subversion into Hollywood’s glorification of its male heroes.
Hollywood finds a way. To keep telling the same stories over and over again, that is. There’s too much going on in Fallen Kingdom, and yet somehow not enough, either. Still: dinosaurs!
Ten years of Marvel superheroism culminates in a battle for the universe itself. Exhausting, bitterly humorous, and gripped in a stunning finality, it’s almost too much to take in, yet somehow not enough.
A rote disappointment. There is nothing shocking or even mildly unexpected here. But there is an ironic weakening of the power of the xenomorphs to terrify.
Thinks it’s edgy and transgressive, the punk little brother of all those other stodgy comic-book movies, but it isn’t. It’s just slightly more candy-colored.
Color me not in the least bit stunned.
After a few quick nods to the profoundly unethical act at its core, it shrugs it off and uses it as the basis for its fairy-tale romance. This is not okay.
Humorless, rote, clichéd, and entirely unsurprising. Antoine Fuqua attempts to recapture old Hollywood magic — and fails — rather than create his own.
I am the prime demographic for this movie, and I found it only sort of inoffensively blah. Chris Pratt: He’s no Jeff Goldblum.