Review of Luca (2021) by Psychopathictim — 19 Jun 2021

Luca is a good film, with bad pacing issues at the end that honestly hamper the enjoyment of the rest of the film, and that is unfortunate. This film dives into themes I find very deep, and interesting.

Luca is a film about the legacies of family, the way they treat their children, and what effect their treatment has on their children. An overprotective mother who reprimands her son for his curiosity in exploring the surface world. A 'deadbeat father' who abandons his son who, as a result, has to fend for himself. An only father, who wants nothing more than to protect his daughter from the pain of losing competitions to bullies. The children of these families are outcasts, both in a social sense and a physical sense. Luca and Alberto are fish-men, sea creatures from the bottom of Porto Rosso - a town of superstitious cryptid believers who want to hunt down and kill these monsters for terrorizing the fishermen of the town. People in the real world think of themselves as being holistically different from animals, and that us creating a civilization separates us from other animals we share this planet with. This concept - by and large - is made of **** We are animals, just the same as any other animal on this planet, and it's stupid of us to convince ourselves otherwise. This theme of an 'us against them' mentality is what makes up the bulk of the ensuing conflict in this film. "The sea monsters are real, and we as a civilization must capture and kill the monsters to stop them from terrorizing us!" "But what right do we have?" is the question the film asks.

The people of Portorosso fear Roberto and Luca, at least that is how it seems in the beginning anyway. The only reason this film is not higher is because of some unfortunate pacing issues. And that is a shame, I really wanted to like this film more.

The Resulting climax of the sea monsters winning a bike race should feel very impactful, instead it feels rushed and there's no time to take it all in. This is because the film resolves three different story conflicts at once, at the very end of the movie, in the span of 5 minutes. In 5 minutes, Luca wins the race, his family accept him being on the surface, and the town just... forgets it's fear of monsters and accepts them into the town. SERIOUSLY, of all the things this movie did, this was the thing that got me bad. EVERYBODY in the crowd just forgets their hatred and fear of the monsters that've been in their town for so long. There's no conflict, no dialogue, they just throw down there fishing spears, nets, and harpoons and forget ALL about their prejudices and go sing "kumbaya" together with the fish. It would've been far more interesting to see some last minute drama erupt between the towns people and the fish people, having Luca's family - for the first time in their lives - stand up for their son against the mob of angry villagers, a stand off between them. A speech is said by Luca about courage to stand up for yourself. And then, as a result, other towns people step away from their umbrellas, they ALSO reveal themselves to be sea creatures. They stand side by side with Luca. The mob of once angry people, now look at each other in shock and confusion. One of them looking down at their spears, and before long... one by one, all of them throw down their spears. The bully, Ercole, the antagonist of the film, goes off on the mob like before, saying "what are you doing? They're monsters!" and the rest proceeds like before. These small changes make the scene from before much better, at least in my opinion, because we get more time as the audience to take in the moment. This is all happening at once, and without a certain struggle between the people of Porto Rosso to come to terms with the fact their own people are fishmen, and time to take in the events that are occurring, the film's climax just feels rushed and overall hampers down the rest of the film.

It's not a bad movie, by all accounts it's a great movie with outstanding messages about believing yourself and accepting who you are. But it's biggest and un-ignorable flaw is that without sufficient time in fleshing out the resolutions to conflicts, it's ending leaves a lot to be desired.