Review of Isle of Dogs (2018) by Vahn — 27 Nov 2020

I...I'm kind of debated here: I can see there's a lot of passion going through this movie, there's a lot of cure and detail put into it, but at the same time it never felt it knew what it was trying to do. I feel that as much as the cure into it was plenty, it was mismanaged.

I mean let's start with the talking dogs: the movie says that the movie is focused on the dogs dialogue first, with the humans mostly talking Japanese (mostly, because some don't, for some reason), and the reason I guess was to help us relate more with the dogs rather than the humans, to let us see the PoV of the dogs....but then there's a LOT of scenes with humans talking, introducing us characters we don't know (and most likely never will), and makes the whole dog talk a weird inconsistency. I think they should've made dogs silent instead, communicate with whines and barks instead, or perhaps have subs on THEM rather than the humans, or if you're going to put a foreign speech to make us "separate" from them, well, make their presence actually NOT matter! Secondly, the story is too messy to understand: there's this boy, called Atari, who wants to find his dog who was sent to this trash island. Why was it send to trash island? Because of a disease called dog flu that attacks all dogs. Why were they sent to the island? Because the bad guy hates dog and doesn't want to heal them. This is pretty much the plot btw and there's really not much else to say: the bad guy is there, he wants to look menacing, but there's really little of him, and the other protagonist, a girl which I don't even remember the name, wants to crusade against dog hate and is the ONLY other character that doesn't speak Japanese (alongside the interpreter...which again makes no sense! Are we supposed to be seeing the dogs PoV or not?!). I guess that, unsurprisingly, the best characters are the dogs but that's only because we get to see them more. And yet it feels lacking: the main 5 dogs are pretty bland and only the black dog gets any sort of character development, then you meet the other faction, outcasts or something, who were potentially great characters on their own, which I won't spoil but they could've made an entire movie on them ALONE!. But they appear only at the end, we barely even see them, except one or two, and then they disappear.

I just don't understand what this movie was trying to do: the movie is kind of depressing but not in a good way, it just wants to be dark for the sake of dark, and the message it gives is quite mean and pretty cruel (although I'm sure that's not their intention). I assume there's a political message here but I guess I never understood it because when the movie ended I was just questioning "what did I just watch exactly?". I didn't hate it, but I didn't like it either. I was hoping it was a good adventure movie about finding one's dog, with SOME human interactions and human side story. Instead if tried too much of both, but not enough in my opinion.

I guess take a look but I'm not sure really. I'll probably forget it in a few days.