The Doctor’s Diagnosis: F
This is the first time that I’ve ever discussed Disney animation on this site, so I need to go off on a bit of a rant before I really get into this dumpster fire. So let me summarize my thoughts on this movie before going off on a tangent: Strange World is an awful, pandering, condescending film that effectively summarizes everything that is wrong with modern Hollywood and Disney. I didn’t expect to particularly like this movie, but I didn’t expect to be this pissed off by it either.
Now, some backstory. I didn’t grow up watching Disney’s animated films, or even really animated films in general. Other than Alice in Wonderland, which is still my favorite Disney cartoon, I didn’t watch any of these movies as a kid. I was just never interested. In the last year or so, I sought to rectify this gap in my movie knowledge and watched a lot of Disney movies, focusing on the biggest hits (and some others at the recommendation of The Film Nurse). Overall, it was a mixed bag for me. I really enjoyed some, like The Jungle Book and Aladdin, but I honestly don’t understand why people adore The Lion King so much. The important thing, though, is that I really didn’t hate any of them and can understand why someone, especially if they saw a certain one at a certain age, would have an attachment to a particular movie.
I think that’s because Disney once stood for something. Regardless of how I feel about individual movies, the Disney logo was like a quality-guaranteed label for family entertainment. Disney was a creative powerhouse, creating new worlds and reinventing old fairy tales to bring them to new generations of children. That company is fucking dead. It’s gone. They are now a soul-sucking, creativity-bashing corporate nightmare that is only concerned with agenda pushing and draining the life from every intellectual property on the planet.
This being an original movie, we are left with the agenda pushing. Strange World is about the Clades, a family of adventurers in the world of Avalonia. In a flashback, we learn that Jaeger Clade and his son Searcher went on an expedition to go beyond the known boundaries of the world. Jaeger goes missing during the trip, while Searcher discovers Pando, a plant that can be used as an energy source. Flash forward some years and Pando is now powering the entire world. However, some force is attacking Pando and threatening the world’s energy supply. Searcher and his son Ethan must join a crew of forgettable characters to save the source of Pando from the threat. In a twist so shocking that Stevie Wonder could see it coming, the energy source in the film is actually a threat and it is the planet itself that is trying to destroy it, meaning (gasp!) the planet’s inhabitants were the real threat all along! When our heroes discover this, they realize that they must destroy Pando for the good of the planet and everyone will just have to get by without electricity until they figure out a more sustainable energy source. I assume that there is a deleted epilogue where every hospital shuts down from lack of electricity and thousands die.
Strange World is a 102 minute long lecture about climate change. Actually, that may not do justice to the subtlety of the film. If I was tied to a chair and had Greta Thunberg scowl and yell “how dare you!” at me for two hours, it would be more subtle (and possibly more entertaining) than Strange World. Captain Planet thinks that this movie needs to chill out. You can have messages in movies. Hell, this is far from being a new message. Fern Gully did this shit 30 years ago. The problem is that modern Disney is incapable of (or disinterested in) good storytelling and having any sort of nuance to anything. That’s when messages turn into an agenda and Strange World bludgeons the audience with this agenda, wielding it like a sledgehammer.
The other big selling point here that Disney has been pushing is that Ethan is their first openly-gay animated character. Here’s the problem, Disney: you fucking can’t write for shit anymore. Ethan’s sexuality and boyfriend have nothing to do with the plot. Nothing. Zero. If the character was straight, there would be no reason for their girlfriend to be in the movie because they have fuck all to do with anything. The film would frequently grind to a halt so that Ethan could say “btw, I’m straight and have a girlfriend. Just wanted to remind you. Okay, on with the adventure!” That’s all that this is. I don’t give a fuck that the character is gay, but it’s obvious that this character is gay just so that Disney can say that they have a gay character. That’s tokenism, Disney. I started hating Ethan not because he’s gay, but because he has to constantly tell me that he’s gay when there is more important, world-saving shit going on and this self-absorbed fuck just wants to keep telling me about his boyfriend. It’s like hanging out with a vegan that has to tell you that they are a vegan every five fucking minutes even though you have assured them that you don’t give a shit.
Other than those two big selling points, there isn’t much here. The plot is derivative of Journey to the Center of the Earth, with large dashes of the superior Atlantis: The Lost Empire thrown in for good measure. The characters are a pile of nothing with the usual stereotypes: the macho (sorry, “toxically masculine”) guy, the shady politician, the reluctant hero, etc. There is a non-human character that joins the heroes so that Disney can sell toys of it. There is nothing, not a goddam thing, in Strange World that hasn’t been done a million other times and done far better.
I will say that I feel bad for the folks in charge of designing the environments and creatures for the movie. They obviously put a lot of effort into this and, even though I don’t like this animation style, there was clearly a lot of care put into that aspect of the film. Too bad that that work was completely squandered.
I hate this movie. I absolutely fucking hate this movie. Disney, as it was when I was a kid, doesn’t exist anymore and they repeatedly double-down on their agenda-pushing bullshit and defend their recent releases. If you don’t like it, then you are just a bigot or you don’t believe in science or whatever. Well, Strange World has grossed $36 million off a budget of $180 million and Disney’s stock price just hit its lowest point in eight years. Enjoy your success, you condescending pricks.
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