Incredibles 2 showed the “real” superheroes how it’s done
Image: Screenshot: The Incredibles 2 Film Features The Pixar Moment
Let’s be honest: Superhero action was never designed for the physical world. Studios have done their best over the years, spending millions on “live-action” visual effects shots designed to mimic spectacle that originally cost a couple of bucks’ worth of ink and paper to create. But the end result has typically been massively budgeted movies like Avengers: Endgame that somehow offer only a pale shadow of what their counterparts in the world of animation had been knocking out for years in the action department.
At no time has that dichotomy been clearer than in 2018, when not just one but two animated superhero movies showed up to blow their flesh-and-blood competitors out of the water. Sony’s Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse won obvious points on style (and with the Academy) with its exaggerated color palette, heartfelt human element, and gorgeously composed shots that would fit perfectly in a comic book splash panel. But for the sheer thrill of watching superheroes in motion, saving lives and doing their thing, look to Helen “Elastigirl” Parr and Pixar’s Incredibles 2.
Pixar (and director Brad Bird) had already set an extraordinarily high bar for cape-and-cowl action 14 years earlier, filling the first Incredibles with explosive, weighty superhero battles—none more memorable than pre-adolescent speedster Dash’s escape from a horde of hovercraft-equipped goons through a hostile island jungle. Like that sequence, Incredibles 2’s best action set piece—which sees Helen Parr break out every move in her elastic arsenal to stop a runaway train threatening to smash up Municiberg—focuses on a single character. Both scenes also highlight an element that animation is fundamentally more capable of capturing: speed.
It’s not just that Elastigirl’s desperate motorcycle chase through crowded city streets—stretching and pushing herself and her bike to their limits in the process—moves at a breakneck pace. It’s that cinematographer Mahyar Abousaeedi’s virtual camera stays right there with her for every daring maneuver, offering up wide panning shots that capture the exhilarating kinetic energy of each flip, jump, and physics-defying leap of the pursuit. It’s hard to overstate how refreshing the clarity and focus of the camerawork here is: At every step of the sequence, we know exactly where Helen and her bike are, where the train is, and what dangers and obstacles stand between the two. Even the best live-action superhero movies let themselves get muddled when too many moving parts are introduced to the mix. The Incredibles 2 holds onto clarity with an intensity bordering on the superheroic.
All that, and it functions as a tremendous character piece, reminding the audience why Elastigirl is her family’s apex superhero. Her kids are powerful but untested; her husband is a well-meaning but bungling bruiser. But Helen Parr is a technician by necessity, dismantling problems with a cool precision conveyed, perfectly as ever, by Holly Hunter’s no-nonsense vocal performance. As the chase ensues, Helen flips through options with her mission control team, escalating her responses as the available tools dwindle. Where Mr. Incredible might give himself a celebratory cheer after pulling off a move as cool as the building-grinding bike maneuver that gets Helen atop the train, she keeps her focus entirely on the mission. If there’s satisfaction at finally being well and truly back in her element, it’s conveyed not through self-congratulatory crowing but through the steely determination with which she throws herself into the next step of the task.
Like much of Pixar’s sequel output, Incredibles 2 can never quite match the emotional stakes of its predecessor; the film’s messaging veers wildly, with lots of conversations about “good laws versus bad laws,” the role of stay-at-home dads (?), and a villain whose major complaint against the heroes is that relying on them means you won’t call the cops if you’re in danger. (Woof.) But as a movie about people with superpowers using those powers to do stuff, it’s essentially unimpeachable—and a strong argument for the idea that animation is the natural inheritor of the comic book action throne.
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The train chase is dope, to be sure, but the escape from the studio into the helicopter rescue/dogfight is the best setpiece in the film.
Baby vs Raccoon.
Elastigirl’s fight with the Screenslaver is pretty great too. The look of it with the flashing lights is stunning.Bird really has a great eye for action.
That strobe-fright freaked out my little girl so much she’s forbidden us from re-watching it if she’s around.
It made all the sense in the world that his first live action venture was a Mission Impossible entry (one that also elevated it from a reliable action series to the start of a GREAT action series) because his animated sensibilities are such a great fit. The Burj Khalifa sequence is still the best IMAX sequence I’ve ever seen in a non-documentary
One of my movie regrets is not seeing that movie in IMAX. I didn’t realize what I was missing until it was too late.
I saw it on IMAX and was almost nauseous and sort of jumped out of my chair when Ethan loses his grip on that tower ledge.
Too bad the strobe effect got toned down after the first week of release. I wish that version was still available as a supplement.
I didn’t realize they changed it. I saw it the day after it opened and they had warning signs outside the theater.
I’d be down for an Incredibles Disney+ series, maybe leveraging some of the B-list heroes we met in this film. The strength of the movies is really the family dynamic, since neither offers up much in the villain department (the sequel in particular, BLAH). Just spending time with the fam is enough for me!
I’d stick up for Syndrome as a villain. Purposefully he’s a little campy, but he’s still by far the best iteration of entitled fanboy as villain (which has been done a lot of times sense). Plus Jason Lee’s line readings are fantastic“You sly dog, you got me monologuing”
“And got . . . BIZZAYYY!”
I’m amazed they got away with a bunch of things in that movie, but that line is near the tops of the list.
They’ve edited out the next line about “supers aren’t supposed to breed”.
Yeah, Syndrome is a fantastic villain, one of the best that Disney/Pixar has ever created. Dude combines both layers that you can empathize with, with being completely vile. It’s a rare villain that gets a full-on Indiana Jones death, and I’m like “Yep, got what he deserved”. But Syndrome makes that list handily.Screenslaver does significantly drag down this film for me. Catherine Keener is never not luminescent, but her conflict wasn’t really with Elastigirl or Mr. Incredible, so the conflict always felt forced. Which can only contrast badly with how personal the fight between Buddy and Bob became.Plus, as stated, Jason Lee had some of the best line readings ever, so he was a really tough act to follow: “I had to make some major modifications to make it ready to fight you. But you are worth it. Because after all . . . I am your biggest fan.”
The really amazing thing is that Syndrome was initially created just as a random chump for the family to fight in the opening scene (which is where the whole “You married Elastigirl” dialogue came from), but then none of the Pixar animators liked the main villain (apparently a totally generic mad scientist) that much, so he was moved into the role.
Oh yeah, I think Syndrome is a top notch villain and Jason Lee is a wonderful psychotic in the role
I really love the switch to utter contempt when Syndrome says “And I’ve outgrown you.”
Although she was under-used I think, the casting of Katherine Keener (who is typically slotted into the “sad mom” role) as a supervillian is great.
And Bob Odenkirk an obvious “he’s doing the Saul Goodman schtick but it’s clearly a red herring” casting. Which is OK, I could listen to Bob reading a phone book in that voice.
I thought an Incredibles prequel done in a hand-drawn style would have been great like they did a Buzz Lightyear series. There was the animated short “Mr. Incredible and Pals” as a dvd feature, but it was more a parody of 60s superhero cartoons with commentary by the actual Mr. Incredible and Frozone.
parody of 60s superhero cartoons with commentary by the actual Mr. Incredible and Frozone.That sounds awesome, and almost Venture Bros.-esque. I hope it’s one of the extras on Disney+.
The commentary track over “Mr. Incredible and Pals” is my single favorite Pixar project of all time. Between that, “Jack-Jack Attack” and “Boundin’,” the Incredibles DVD extras were the absolute high water mark of the DVD era for me.
There was the animated short “Mr. Incredible and Pals” as a dvd feature, but it was more a parody of 60s superhero cartoons with commentary by the actual Mr. Incredible and Frozone.
It is probably the single best use of Samuel L. Jackson in a film, ever. “Oh that’s right. The tan superhero gets caught!”
“DID YOU OKAY THE RABBIT?”
“Hoo boy. OK, the rabbit bites.”
“They told me it was a new process!”
Maybe one focusing on Violet and Dash learning the ropes of hero work.
I like it. Keep the scope small, like averting catastrophes at their school.
Yea, by design The Incredibles just begs for lots of fun adventures.
For a long time now, I have had the stance that if a real superhero turns up, we are screwed and I should move as far away from that city as possible. Sure all is great when they save the day from a bank robbery, but before you know it there will be a guy with a giant drill destroying the city.However we can’t get rid of said superheroes. They are not causing the powerful bad guys, it just means they exist too. So screwed.
Great write-up, this was my favorite part of the movie for all the reasons laid out here. The action is also designed for cartoon stuff, like how Mrs. Incredible’s motorcycle can separate according to her stretching, there’s one point where she uses her back end to slingshot herself forward and it’s a total blast, it works in that world’s physics while doing it in live-action would likely look wrong.And one of the weird muddles of the movie is how the train sequence of action in cartoon form exists with the Jack-Jack vs raccoon fight of pure cartoon violence/action, it feels like a Looney Tune — it’s a lot of fun but doesn’t fit with the rest of the movie.
Especially Helen’s impressive leg strength 😉
Anthony Lane?! Shouldn’t you be lazily disdaining several movies like the very act of watching is a chore undertaken out of noblesse oblige, instead of commenting on the AV Club?
he really has been phoning it in for the last few years, hasn’t he? I think it was over when he wrote that watching Infinity War was like “being a pallbearer at the funeral of cinema” or some such nonsense. And then he reviewed a cartoon ladies ass….
He’s always been more interested in what Anthony Lane has to say about a movie than what a movie has to say to Anthony Lane. Him being horny for a cartoon is the most engaged I’ve ever seen him!
I just loved that he clearly thought his Elastigirl-boner was a universal experience.
I’m sorry. Did you just say it was the most engorged you’ve ever seen him?
The first Incredibles remains my favorite Pixar, I wanted them to make a sequel virtually since I walked out of theaters after seeing the first one, and yet this left me cold. After a 14 year wait, it just seemed disappointing that all they could do with the story is flipflop Helen and Bob’s plots from the first one.
Not to mention the original ends with the team united and ready to kick ass and the sequel opens with them fucking up all over the place. The guy is the Underminer, I suppose, but that’s some swift undermining.
Incredibles 2 ends with them driving off to stop an undetermined crime, so we can only assume that part 3 will open five minutes later, with the family having accidentally destroyed the Statue of Liberty while attempting to catch a purse snatcher.
That’s the reality of using a hammer like Mr. Incredible instead of a scalpel like Elastagirl. Which completely makes sense and justifies the role reversal.
Same. It’s the sequel I wanted more than any other, so my anticipation was astronomical. Maybe that wasn’t fair, but this is the pedestal on which The Incredibles sits. I came away thinking the parents’ role-reversal made sense, but the more I thought about it, the more I wish they went in another direction.
The role reversal might have worked if they had switched up the rest of the plot, but they also kept the part where the active parent is working for a benefactor who says they want to bring heroes back but who turns out to be the villain.
It not only just flipflops their plots from the first one, but basically repeats all the thematic tensions from the first film, too. So many of the arguments between these characters could be copy/pasted into the first film’s script, and vice versa. I couldn’t believe none of the characters had progressed, even the kids. (And an aside, I think it’s completely bonkers we were supposed to think the family didn’t realize Jack Jack had powers at the end of the first film.)
i felt the same about cars 3. seemed like a copy of cars 1 but with a new car filling the tires of the owen car
Jack Jack was terrifying. Distracting him with a cookie will only work for so long, then you have an arsonist animal torturer in the making. Nightmare material.
A baby/toddler with superpowers is actually not something I can recall seeing covered in the superhero genre, regardless of medium. Treated seriously, it could make a good story.
Another comment just to chime in, “same.”It was really shocking how lazy this was. This is a situation where animation actually limited what they did with the story. If this was live action, a 14-year wait would have forced the filmmakers to deal with evolving the characters, if in no other way than simply by considering time. But with the freedom of animation they could ignore that, and as a result just made it take place in the same exact anti-superhero world, same exact time period, and weirdly same exact villain scheme as the first film. It was less a sequel a more of a film for people who probably didn’t see the first one because it came out so long ago.
Imagine an Incredibles sequel where the character had been allowed to age. An older Bob and Helen having to come to terms with their kids being grownup superheroes who no longer need their help, while dealing with the fact that they’re past their crime-fighting prime. Jack-Jack as a teenager. Pixar loves to do stuff about coping with the passage of time and adjusting to change, think what they could do with this.Also, in this movie Edna is exactly the same. She hasn’t changed at all and no one asks why, because she’s Edna Mode and aging is for lesser beings.
You could use this concept to interrogate some of the tropes of superhero fiction, like the idealistic square-jawed hero giving way to the darker, more morally ambiguous types of the 80s and 90s. Maybe Violet and Dash have joined a superhero group with more violent members who wear a lot of leather and big shoulder pads, and Helen and Bob are worried about them hanging out with the wrong crowd.
i feel like i see this take a lot, where people wanted there to be a time skip between 1 and 2, and it really seems like people only want that because they don’t want to deal with a superpowered baby. which, okay, i get it, they leaned a bit too far into jack-jack in the sequel for my tastes, but at the same time, a superpowered baby is exactly the sort of thing an animated movie can do that no live-action movie ever could. you could dial back on jack-jack’s scenes in the sequel and probably make a tighter movie, but even what we got seems infinitely more enjoyable than a (14-year????) time jump to when he can speak.
Well to be clear on a couple of points, Incredibles 2 didn’t “deal” with having a super powered baby, they just rehashed and extended the gag of Jack Jack and the babysitter from the first movie. He’s basically the sequel’s version of the squirrel looking for his nut in Ice Age or the minions from Despicable Me.But moreover, I don’t think anyone who suggests a time jump does so cause of the baby, that’s kind of a strawman. I don’t think anyone really cares about how they deal with the baby, the complaint/suggestion is to try and do something that isn’t a rehash of the first film, suggesting a time jump is just one easy idea. There are any number of things they could have done to evolve these characters that don’t involve a time jump and still let you play around with a superpowered baby if that is a point of interest for the filmmakers.
It’s not just that they invert Helen and Bob’s roles and otherwise remake the movie — *every single action sequence* involves the supers using their powers to stop a vehicle.
The opening sequence is fun, when they want to stop an out-of-control mining rig. Then Elastigirl uses every stretchy power in her arsenal to stop… an out-of-control train. Finally, the big climax involves all of the supers teaming up to stop… an out-of-control yacht.
Don’t forget the middle of the movie when she has to escape with the ambassador…from an out-of-control helicopter.
Same, I didn’t hate the sequel by any means but it glaringly fails to live up to the original.
Yeah, this movie was 90% rehash and didn’t do a single bit of any of it better than the first movie did.
And essentially repeating the villain, with the only major difference being that there’s less of a personal connection between them and the family proper.Seriously, just slot Syndrome into the second movie, and instead of the muddled “call the police and wait for them instead of waiting for a superhero” line, have it be a “slip on the patented anti-intruder glove next to the bed instead of waiting for a superhero” line. And hey, Syndrome’s general personality and secondary moneymaking scheme would be a vastly better response to potential criticisms of his plan.To wit: “well, what if the intruder has the patented anti-anti-intruder boot?”The response: “well then, you should’ve spent the money on the patented anti-anti-anti-intruder strapon dildo!”Meanwhile, the second movie’s villain is *just* idealistic enough that she should’ve been way more concerned with similarly devastating criticisms to her own ideological crusade.And, let’s just go there and be done with it: it also speaks to a truly gigantic and utterly batshit blind spot of privilege that she somehow thinks calling the non-super-powered police on a regular telephone was going to magically save her dad’s life. Like, uh, even guys as rich as him aren’t going to get an instantaneous response, and, indeed, usually choose to live in places that necessarily increase the response time a bit… which is why those places usually have their own private security. What was missing from her dad’s “strategy” for staying alive was a panic room and private security, not a phone call to the regular police.And all that is fine, of course, if either the other characters in the movie, or just the movie itself, would interrogate her mess of beliefs rationally, on their own terms, instead of emotionally, on the terms of the central family.
If I may take a little issue with the characterization of Bob as a “bungling bruiser” — I don’t think he bungles that much, but his power does mean a lot of stuff suffers collateral damaged. Considering he’s got the same powers as the Tick, Bob’s almost s skilled surgeon by comparison.
One thing people often misremember about the two movies is how human and intelligent they make Bob. If you’re not paying attention he’s just a sitcom bumbling dad. If you are, they actually do really interesting things with him (like how much he wants to support his wife by taking care of the kids in the second even if it does hurt his pride, he really is noble). So I hate when sometime he’s criticized as a figure of toxic masculinity. At least he’s trying.
Yeah, it seems to run hand-in-hand with the idiotic notion that the film is objectivist screed. Bob WANTS to help people, even if he can’t do it in a super way — like when he tells the old woman how to successfully appeal InsuraCare’s denial of her claim. And it’s evident he was doing that for a lot of clients because his boss bitched him out for it.And when Bob and Lucius are doing their off-book hero work, Bob points out that he can’t just crash through walls of a burning building, because that would risk bringing the whole building down (he then does it anyway, and the building comes down).
Yeah, I am pretty tired of the case for it as objectivist. It doesn’t fit. IT’s clearly the work of someone who is aware of the objectivist mindset and doesn’t really agree with it.
That gets a bit murkier when you also factor in Tomorrowland, at which point it starts to look more like a pattern even if Bird isn’t fully aware of it.
Eh, I think it’s actually confusion about the philosophical idea at play. The theme that Brad Bird recurrently comes back to is known as “alienation”. Bird’s life story is almost paradigmatically one of a genius artist; he’s basically bounced from one brilliant creative project to another. He started his career as an animator working under Don Bluth, his first project after getting fired from The Fox and the Hound was to become one of the original writers for The Simpsons, and from there bounced around in the writing circles for Rugrats, The Critic and King of the Hill before he moved on to The Iron Giant. It’s pretty clear that his lived experience centers around finding and being part of legitimately brilliant storytelling circles, broken up intermittently with studio heads who don’t understand the work that circle is doing. Hence the alienation he feels when he has to venture outside his creative circle.Thing is, Ayn Rand is the best-known for speaking about alienation, even if she’s hardly the first, best, or only speaker on the subject. It’s more a case that there are lot more people in this country who have read Atlas Shrugged than have read Marx’s The German Ideology, or pretty much any of Emile Durkheim’s work. So the simple fact that Bird expresses a sense of profound alienation about having to deal with people who don’t get you pretty inevitably gets him lumped in with Rand, even though he clearly has no truck with her selfishness, simply because she’s the only cultural or philosophical touchstone to the underlying concept he keeps coming back to.
Well said. Being talented means a combination of triumphs and frustrations, with more than a dash of resentment from others.
I agree alienation is at the heart of his stories. The villains of his films, or at least of Tomorrowland and the Incredibles series, are either railing against the superior person who could make the world a better place, or talking about how they could make the world a better place if the damn common man would just leave them alone and stop being so negative. At a certain point it seems he doesn’t hold a high view of the regular person, and thinks of them and their petty concerns and feelings as an impediment to progress. If they’d just believe in the superior beings (be they super heroes or simply genius creatives) and let them do their work, everything would work out. It kind of feels like he’s got a megaphone and is using to shout at people to “GET OUT OF THE DAMN WAY!” important things are being done, and they’re cluttering up the space.It’s not that he doesn’t care, or is self interested, it’s just there’s this sense that he thinks there is a better class of people, and the rest of us are kind of a drag.
Honestly, it seems like the issue Bird has is less with the “common man” than with bureaucracy and institutional roadblocks. There are people everywhere doing everything they can to make things better and make a positive difference (in whatever they’re doing) and there are people making it really difficult for those people to get anything done.
I mean sort of, but the bureaucracy just facilitates the petty interests of the individual. You have the guy who MR Incredible saves, who then sues him, plus all the victims of the train incident, who also sue him, then his boss who won’t let him help the old lady, and then the bad guy Buddy. There are situations and systems which enable them to fulfill their desires, but the things that ring trouble for our heroes are sourced in them. Even the government’s law around supers is presented like its just trying to satisfy the will of the people, hence there’s no use of supers as secret agents, just a bunch of witness protection style programs. Weirdly the system is presented as good, helpful even, it’s the people who suck. Even the innocents the Incredibles help out are often presented as petty and kind of awful, or just benignly useless. Mirage (Buddy’s assistant) is only good once her boundaries have been violated, and she’s still a participant in around have a dozen murders before that. In incredibles 2, no one on the train tries to do anything, they just freak out over that long chase, waiting to be rescued. The bad guys don’t care who they kill in trying to execute their plan (even though they’re opposed to supers for moral reasons, as opposed to being agents of chaos or in it exclusively for wealth and power) and no regular joe has any idea what to do about anything. Tomorrow Land has an even less favorable view, regular people are just stupid cattle who can’t even get the right message unless it’s shoved in their dumb faces. Otherwise they are basically useless, and will just keep circling the drain until the world ends. It’s better for the wise to remove themselves and work in peace in another dimension, drip feeding knowledge to the normies in a manner that won’t be too destructive, instead of using that knowledge to help humanity in the first place. The geniuses need their space to work, and after they build paradise, who cares. A robot, a genius kid, and a genius older dude who is in love with the kid robot… Even after the movie ends they just start recruiting again, they don’t integrate back to earth, regular people still can’t be trusted not to interfere.Reminds me of Harry Potter, why do the wizards hide? Is it because they’re scared of regular humans (that makes no damn sense given what they can do, even their children)? No, it’s because they think regular humans suck, and they don’t want to deal with their bullshit. But at least Wizard society is presented as being kind of fucked up, in Tomorrowland everyone in the audience is who the film is saying is useless and gonna doom the world, except for maybe a couple special kids among them, it’s the regular world that’s crap. The movie even castigates people for watching disaster movies (as it repeatedly shows us the world ending).
I was going to mention the “bring down the building” line. Bob may not have a whole lot to offer other than brute strength, but he’s fully aware of the consequences of his powers. You can kind of tell it in the way he punches people; he can hold back enough so that he doesn’t do too much damage. (Unless you’re his boss at Insuricare and you’ve just pissed him off too much.)
Plus, Bob has to use his wits to destroy both Omnidroids in the first film.
That is something I like about Bob, especially in the second one. He shows traits of toxic masculinity, but he actively tries to overcome them. IMHO, that’s a powerful thing; that shows men that it’s OK, even desirable, to try to get past the roles that you impose on yourself.
I agree that it isn’t particularly fair; Bob, being blessed with standard Brick superpowers (super strength, nigh-invulnerability, large size) typically handles things directly and straightforwardly. Helen, whose powers are literally in her flexibility and adaptability to changing circumstances, is pretty inevitably going to compare favorably to Bob when it comes to solving problems without doing massive damage; she has no choice, and he’s rarely called upon to solve situations where hammers aren’t required.That being said, it can’t be helped that we’ve seen both Bob and Helen stop a speeding train, and the difference was literally push vs. pull.
That’s a good point about train-saving. For my money, here’s the best version:
I’m reminded of a comedy bit SFDebris did when he reviewed Justice League Unlimited, where he noted that every superhero has their own way of opening a locked door that tells you about their personality. Superman will bust down the door to demonstrate his strength. Batman will cleverly pick the lock or deduce the key code combination. In that particular episode, Green Arrow uses his money and connections to infiltrate the temp agency that the company uses, then finds a way to gift the normal guard a week’s vacation.I imagine “find a way to stop a runaway train” is very much a similar, standard problem that writers use to inform readers about the character of their hero.
In Mr. Incredible’s defense, I believe the gap left in the railway by Bomb Voyage’s explosives was too big for him to pull off what Supes did in that scene.
I like that: Spider-Man, as we know, gets in front of it and uses as much webbing as he can to slow it down. It’s scientific and self-sacrificing, which is very him.Anyone have any takes on how other superheroes would do it? The only example I can think of is the Flash, who I think would just rescue all the people and let the train crash. It’s a train, who cares what happens to it as long as no lives are lost.
I could see him first getting everyone off and then creating a vortex behind it to create so much drag that it would stop it.
“I could see him first getting everyone off”.It’s not every superhero who gives you a Happy Ending with your rescue.
Oops, phrasing!Think of the chafing at that speed though…
Not always though, and I appreciated that decision. In the first one he did that base infiltration with pinpoint rock throws and memorizing guard movements, and figured out how to take out the robot by hiding in it really quickly.
I’m really not the target audience for super hero movies. I enjoyed The Incredibles, didn’t love it, but appreciated it for all the Pixar touches that only Pixar seems capable of.But The Incredibles 2 might be the only Pixar movie so far that flat-out bored me.
A choice I was surprised by was to keep everyone the same age and not acknowledge how long it had been since that first movie. The entire superheo genre has flourished in that time, and it feels like we’ve seen this movie before. It might have been more interesting for The Incredibles 2 to be older, perhaps even self-reflective.
It would’ve made more sense to see what became of the kids once they became adults and explore the fallout of the super’s return that seemed to be the point of the end of the first film.
I don’t really remember a lot from this movie, which is disappointing.
Same. I can remember the first one beat for beat, but other than this scene, the one where Helen first fights Screenslayer (sort of) with the wild strobe animation, and Jack-Jack versus the raccoon I really don’t remember much of this one at all.
I didn’t even remember the train scene.
“…a villain whose major complaint against the heroes is
that relying on them means you won’t call the cops if you’re in danger”I didn’t think it was not calling the cops that was the villain’s issue. I thought the issue was being too reliant on superheros rather than taking care of yourself.
Either way, it didn’t give us a very satisfying villain.Why, after establishing that the villain has a reasonable motivation for resenting superheroes, do they never try to defeat this ideology? They defeat the Screenslaver physically but don’t show that she is wrong to think that superheroes make people too reliant on them or whatever. At the end the superheroes save the day, but they save it from mind-controlled superheroes. This does not prove that the world is better off with superheroes.Also, it’s not a very meaningful issue to base a story on. It’s an issue with very little real-world resonance, unless there’s a metaphor I’m not getting.Also, the plan is just dumb. “I want superheroes to be banned, even though they are already banned, so I will work to get them un-banned, so I can work to get them banned again.”
It was about humanity weakening itself by allowing gods from the sky to solve all of its problems.
Basically, Evelyn was ripping off Lex Luthor here. Humanity must rely on humans to solve problems.
The action scenes were wonderful; it was just a letdown that the plot was basically the same as the first movie, just with Bob & Helen’s roles reversed.
It was even that. Because Helen’s emotional arc was almost non-existent. It felt like a rehash of the first movie in that we, yet again, got to watch Bob have an identity crisis about his role in the world.
I was thrilled with this one; especially as a devoted superhero watcher.
Incredibles 2 is perfectly cromulent, but to hang on it a criticism of live-action super-hero movies is just sad. Yes, there are things that can be done in the medium of animation that can’t be done with live action-CGI, but there’s also something very appealing about the real-world look vs the exaggerated, stylized depictions that animation leans into. Quite frankly, I found some of the live-action Spider-Man films much more engaging than Into the Spider-Verse.
It deeply annoyed me that a movie that was ostensibly about Helen, ended up focusing on her husband’s emotional journey. But it’s true that the motorcycle chase showed why Elastigirl is an incredible superhero.
The Dad-at-home stuff felt like watching a sitcom. Bob was sidelined for far too long, I’m just glad he got he got a journey at all.
But the at-home stuff was the only element of character exploration and growth. Like, what emotional journey did Helen go on? She started confident and awesome, was confident and awesome, and remained confident and awesome but with family around. It was very empty.
Good point
My kids love this movie, but I can’t ever get over the big yawner of the whole third act. The whole thing felt like one or two script revisions away from being complete. The motivations for the Deavors just didn’t feel locked in to me. Not to over-analyze a cartoon, but when your plan of action amounts to making superheroes legal again just to make them *really, super* illegal again, you have to sigh. Why not just undermine your brother’s efforts and not involve any heroes at all?
“Let’s be honest: Superhero action was never designed for the physical world.”I love the MCU but both this and Spider-Verse (and Incredibles 1) are basically my big argument for why animation is the superior way to do superheroes.
It made me remember the countless times Roger Ebert loved animation BECAUSE it wasn’t bound to the normal laws of physics that live-action/CG tried to skirt. One example he always liked to point out as something you could do in animation that you could never pull off in live-action is Tarzan “surfing” on the tree branches in the titular Disney film. In live action, your brain starts asking where all of his locomotion comes from and how he could do it in bare feet, but animation, you simply accept it because it doesn’t look realistic, but it looks RIGHT.
See also “realistic” CG that raises more questions than the story can handle. I have no problem buying King Kong as a stop-motion puppet, or even as a man in a suit, but the selective physics of the Peter Jackson version keep me wondering how a gorilla that big doesn’t crush its own bones or tear loose from its own flesh when it jumps 20 feet.
I forget the name of the principal and a quick search doesn’t help, but there was a lot of the same commentary about the jaegers in Pacific Rim. Eventually the weight would be so great that the structure would crush itself simply trying to move. The recent Godzillas seemingly tried to address this with the way the body was shaped, very bottom-heavy.I thought the same thing about Kong when they made him 100+ feet tall. The bone and muscle density required makes no sense.
You’re talking about the square/cube rule. When height is squared, corresponding mass is cubed.KONG SKULL ISLAND didn’t bug me as much because the design for Kong was a straight fantasy creature, more humanoid than a real-life primate. Jackson’s film is the only time he’s been portrayed as, literally, a colossal gorilla, begging comparison to real-life physics.
I thought there was someone’s name attached to it, but that’s definitely the concept. And yeah, I mean it’s King fucking Kong and you just gotta go with it. But the skull lizards made more physiological sense to me. Low to the ground, drew most of their strength from their core, with legs that looked strong enough to support their weight.I’m way overthinking this.
They’re suits filled with wizards, next question
You’re correct in spirit, but haven’t quite got the cube law right. If height is doubled (x2), then area is double squared (x4) and weight is double cubed (x8). So if we take a gorilla (height 1.5m) and expand it to the size of Kong in Skull Island (30m), we find that its length has increased by a factor of 20. Which means weight will go up by a factor of 20 cubed (x8000). Since a gorilla weighs around 150kg, this means Kong weighs 1200 tonnes. Which means you’d need something like this to lift him:
Correct, I should have said it’s the relationship of surface area to volume, not height to mass.
No probs. Your basic point was correct: an animal the size of Kong in Skull Island would not be able to stand up, let alone run and jump. Mind you, I can take that as part of the suspension of disbelief for a fantasy film. And overall I thought K:SI was a pretty good popcorn adventure.
Yeah, I didn’t have a problem with Skull Island Kong. It’s Jackson Kong, which was explicitly modeled on a silverback gorilla, that distracts me with “realism” issues.
I think I was too bored by the time King Kong actually shows up in Peter Jackson’s version to question the physics. It was such a relentlessly mind-numbing movie.
There’s that, too. Engaging story beats good FX.
Color me shocked that Hughes didn’t get out the CANCELLED stamp for a movie with a character named Screenslaver. Maybe if the smarmy self-righteousness was applied with a little more consistency it’d be easier to swallow.
Like all Pixar sequels except for Toy Stories 2 and 3, this one is inferior to the original. The problem is the big reveal is too obvious. It’s perfectly obvious that the Screenslaver is going to be one of the siblings, and it’s really not hard to guess which one.I couldn’t help but think, when watching this movie, how terrifying a toddler with super-powers might be. “Terrifying” as in, oh, Jack-Jack carelessly flicked a claw at you and opened up your jugular vein. Oh, Jack-Jack breathed fire and burned your face off.
I still think the first Toy Story is by far the best. This might be the only series where such an opinion doubles as a hot take
Even the trailer did all but scream “We’re showing so much of Bob Odenkirk to tip you off he’s not the villain”
Her name is Evelyn Deavor. It was obvious from the first press release.
It probably doesn’t help that the movie has the same plot blueprint as the first movie, but with Bob and Helen’s role swapped. The villain of the last movie turned out to be the person who hired the main character in the first place via a proxy, and the same ends up being the case in the sequel.
Alsoshe’s introduced in the classic villain misdirection way, affable, bumbling, self depreciating. You watch enough movies, that move becomes obvious.
That was a good scene, but I’m genuinely floored that the ‘Jack-Jack vs. a raccoon’ fight wasn’t the spotlight moment. Truly hilarious.
I keep forgetting this film exists. Who would have thought the one title in the Pixar catalog that really warranted a sequel (other than Toy Story, duh), would result in such a bland, perfunctory rehash.
I liked it but I didn’t love it, and the story coming up short kinda showed why it took Bird so long, and probably even longer if Tomorrowland didn’t stall his live action fortunes.
Is this the last Pixar movie to have one of their own short films precede the feature?I’m not complaining about the recent Simpsons one since that’s my all-time favorite show, but original Pixar shorts is a sad tradition to break from.
The Maggie short was enjoyable (mainly for sticking the landing on the big laugh at the end), but yeah, I hope that’s more of an exception than a rule because I love the Pixar shorts
I assumed (correctly) that “Bao” was Pixar’s way of ensuring their regular tithe of adult tears was paid in full before the film. They’ll release more shorts if they don’t have the Reduce The Parents To Sobbing Wrecks Moment in a future film.
Yeah, but the son was such a jerk! He was mean to his mom and doesn’t deserve the hot Western woman he apparently is going to marry who appreciates Chinese cuisine more than he does. I hope they get divorced and that the mom chooses to stay in contact with the ex-daughter-in-law more than him.
I came out of this more or less having a good time, but I can’t help but feel a tad let down. For as much as we remember Dash’s amazing moment in the first one, he gets nothing like that in this movie. We can point to a lot of cool Elastigirl scenes, but besides the hilarious Jack-Jack fight, I can’t point to any equally great moments for anyone else in the family. Even Frozone is just kinda there. And that’s sort of my main issue with the film, which doesn’t feel as balanced to me as the original.
I had mentioned in The Incredibles article how much I loved the themes of that movie. Whether they are agreable or not, it’s worth discussing. The sequel isn’t as successful at this, but I did like the idea of a counterpoint to Helen; They share feminist views, but Helen stops short of being as bitter as Evelyn is. Rather than worry, Evelyn is very laid back, and instead of stretching herself because she’s trying to do everything, she tricks people into doing everything for her.
And Helen’s subsequent excitement in her phone call with Bob afterward is the emotional highlight of film, LOL. The look on Bob’s face as he see on news demonstrates how much better Elastigirl is as superhero, which make his stunned and defeated reactions all the more funnier as he had to swallow his pride to maintain his support for her.Man, even if The Incredibles 2 isn’t quite as good as first, it is still one of Pixar’s absolute bests.
lmao grow up hahaha
yeah, most superhero movie fights aren’t as good as the equivalent in the comics, but I’ll make a case for Iron Man vs. Thanos in Infinity War. That was beautifully choreographed and really intense. I think I actually said “ooof!” at one point.
The way his nanotech armor bit by bit gets chipped away leaving him vulnerable to being stabbed was work of art for inventive action choreography. I’ll always prefer animation to “live-action” cgi action scenes, but many of the Marvel fights are still so creative and exciting it’s hard for me to complain too much
When he’s shifting nanobots from his leg to his arm and you know he’s nearly empty…
The whole sequence on Titan is entertaining because of the sheer quantity of stuff going on, but it only reaches greatness toward the end of the fight when it’s just Stark and Thanos, and Stark is literally throwing everything he has – every bit of tech, every amazing invention, every product of his gifted mind – at Thanos, and Thanos just shrugs it all off. It’s a fight scene that serves as both character work and a reflection of the movie’s broader dramatic arc – it’s when the viewer begins to understand that Thanos might actually be unstoppable.
You left out the best part of the sequence 🙂
Hate to be that guy, but this gif is from Endgame, not Infinity War. Awesome moment, sure, but different sequence and different movie.
Iron Man vs. Thanos in Infinity War is indeed great, but the standout for me will always be Dr. Strange vs. Thanos. The movie does such a great job of illustrating how far-ranging and imaginative Dr. Strange’s powers are, and an even better job of illustrating how Thanos uses his Infinity Stones powers to dismantle them. Incredibly inventive, and rewarding of many re-watches.
Your thesis is spot on: the best superhero action sequences are in animation. I’m lukewarm on the rest of Incredibles 2, but I’ve frequently just watched the Helen/train chase sequence by itself (in the same way I watch the opening club sequence in Blade) just because it puts in such a good mood.Into the Spider-verse likewise has actions scenes that are far superior to those found in live action: Dr. Octopus vs Miles and Peter and the brawl at Aunt May’s house are two of my favorites.
I loved Doc Ock in the Tobey Maguire ‘Spider-Man 2′, but ‘Into the Spider-Verse’ blows that film out of the water in terms of robo-tentacle action. It’s the best use of the character I’ve ever seen.
Something that’s brought up in the Wall-E writeup is even more true here; the camerawork that perfectly mimics real tracking shots keeps the movement so much more real than a scene with a stretchy woman racing a train across rooftops has any business being. The low angles used in those shots as well. It’s an amazing example of both doing things with animation you can’t in real life, AND keeping it grounded in the real world. Little touches as well like the tire marks on the roof of the train when Helen juices the bike to keep the back end from falling of the side.
I’m a little surprised by everyone’s lukewarm reaction to this one. I love that they mirrored Bob and Helen’s story for the sequel. By doing this Helen got to be the Archetypal “main hero” and through Bob we got to explore the prototypical toxic masculinity of super heroes in a really nuanced and rewarding way. Some of my favorite scenes are with Bob failing his dad duties and actually learning a valuable lesson out of it. It didn’t quite measure up to the original, but still more than earned it’s place among the best Pixar films
I really like The Incredibles 2. It’s not nearly as unified in form and concept as the original, but the updated visuals look great (I’d love it if a group of interns at Pixar were tasked with creating a full remake of the original in the new visual style), and I love how it’s willing to just try on a bunch of different genres, so we get a Looney Tunes short when Jack-Jack fights the raccoon, an after-school sitcom when Bob tries to get Violet’s boyfriend interested in her after accidentally causing his memory to be wiped, a drama where adults sit around drinking and discussing the merits of altruism in the Helen/Evelyn scene, a gritty espionage flick when Helen is tracking down the ScreenSlaver, and a home-invasion movie when Frozone is trying to save the kids from the various hypnotized superheroes.
Pixar pushed the release of the film up a year when it was clear Toy Story 4 was going to need more work, and you can kind of tell in the last third of the movie—the environments in and around the hyperfoil are pretty bland, and the new heroes could have used a few more design passes—but for all that, the visual ingenuity of the action sequences are uniformly great. I’m happy to put it on the same shelf as Batman Returns, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, The Matrix Reloaded, and other sprawling, messy sequels that took bigger risks than their predecessors even as they overshot their ambitions.
It plays like an animated series in itself. You could easily chop it into four or five episodes and it would work perfectly.
Frozone’s ice powers are a whole new level of gorgeous. You can see the edges of his ice structures glisten with moisture.
Superhero action was never designed for the physical world.I work in Creature FX and would love to see Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel done by Disney as an animated feature like they did for Big Hero 6.
I enjoy some of the Fantastic Four stuff, but the stretchy effect would be brutal on a series budget. Think Flash with Elastic Man or whatever his name is.
I still can’t believe that they made an animated adaptation of the Nicolas Cage film Mom And Dad.I mean both films involve a screen emitting a message which causes the parents to go homicidal and murder their kids whilst the children try to survive. So yeah huge plot twist that they’d end their superhero movie with an extended riff on Mom And Dad. Never expected that.
This movie was muddled as hell. Into the Spider-verse was leaps and bounds better in both style and substance. Look no further than Miles Morales to see what being a hero means.
It’s not the original, but I really like this movie a lot. It plays like an animated series, and you could easily chop it up into four or five separate episodes with little effort. It’s so much more complex than people give it credit for, and it humanizes all the characters fairly well. The scene where they visit Violet’s would-be boyfriend at his job always makes me laugh. Just the expression on Violet’s face when she blows water out her noise is enough to make it a great scene, but the rest of it brings everyone at the table into the real world a bit. They didn’t need to include a scene like that in a superhero movie sequel, but I appreciated it because it took it a level above just the regular amounts of pow-boom-smash that would’ve been necessary.And the Jack-Jack/raccoon fight is an all-timer. That furry little bastard had no idea what he was in for.
i’ll always have my visit to Amsterdam January 2005 to remember, when it was raining and i saw The Incredibles and Blade Trinity as a double bill.
The first movie is chock full of great moments, but one of my (the?) favorites is when Helen is breaking into the base and gets trapped in 3 doorways.
The family of psychotic killers offed how many villains in the first flick? Forty?Never saw the second one, and since sequels are always bigger and more noisy, did the psychos take out 100 bad guys in the second one? In Disney cartoons no less–Christ—pure killing.
I think this film would have done a lot better if it just made the villain a little more straightforward. We don’t really need another fake-out like we had with Syndrome. I think a classic, superpowered villain who’d been preparing and honing his skills for all this time would have been great. Show that he’s moved with the times and adapted while Helen and Bob are still at the same level they were before the kids were born. And then you can have the new heroes be really useful, and have some talk about passing the torch to a new generation.
Honestly, this sequel bored me stiff.