Review of Strange World (2022) by Esteemedcolleag — 01 Dec 2022

How did this pass quality control at Disney?

Kids will be bored. Every kid in the theatre was bored and talking over the movie.

The only thing this film will challenge is your patience. The movie seeks to demonstrate that a story can work without conflict or villains, and that perhaps we must overcome ourselves to find deeper meaning. I'll get to this.

The inclusivity messaging (which I have no problem with) is all consuming at the expense of any depth. The characters were designed - seemingly clinically - to be diverse and inclusive to perfection, but the film fails to assign any significance or struggle specific to their identity. They are merely set dressing and either a token attempt at representation or a pathetically shallow one. Everyone just gets along fine, which is ironically enough, a classic trope in the sitcoms of post war America where everything was hunky dory.

The reason I found this to be ironic is it seeks to overturn and poke fun at tropes such as the need for villains, conflict, and masculine protagonists as storytelling devices from classic movies that the majority of the adult audience remember fondly from their own childhood. However it lacks both the emotional clout and the intellectual depth to achieve anything except bore young audiences. It fails to offer an effective motivation for the plot despite eschewing traditional storytelling. Nothing is challenged, and the deeper message is abnormally shallow and weak even for a children's film. Wall E achieved a similar message with far more emotional impact and entertainment value and the main characters weren't even gendered in a conventional sense.