I went to see
The Incredibles early Friday morning with my sister, Sarah. By "early Friday morning" I mean the midnight showing. Yes, Pixar movies have a strange power over me. Also, it was the only time my sister and I could come up with since she's working this weekend and has a two-year-old daughter to take care of when she's off. The daughter spent the night with our parents.
Anyway, we both enjoyed the movie immensely. (Of course, my sister was fairly angry at me afterwards, since I would occasionally whisper comments to her, then shush her when she tried to respond. That's because my sister is
loud and didn't whisper back.)
Since I assume you've already seen the advertisements, you should already know the premise, but I'll try to explain it anyway. Basically, it starts out with a world much like you find in any DC comic book... the world is overrun with superheroes. Sure, there are supervillains, too, but with so many superheroes, any criminal who wants to actually succeed in a crime almost has to have superpowers. These superheroes have superegos, as is evident in the interviews at the very beginning, as Mr. Incredible, the movie's title hero, explains that he's getting tired of saving the world day in and day out, saying "Sometimes I wish the world would just stay saved." He also shows poor grace when he has to deal with a nuisance of a kid who wants to be his sidekick. While you can understand his annoyance, you wish he had handled it better. In any case, we witness Mr. Incredible, whose main power appears to be super-strength, perform, by my count, four heroic acts (maybe five, if you count the kitten in the tree) in about five minutes. Allowing for the theatric compression of time, it might have taken a full hour in his life. It's pretty clear that superheroes live busy lives.
Just after his fun-filled evening of fighting crime, Mr. Incredible makes it to his wedding to Elastigirl, and the newly-weds have a bright future ahead of them. Until the lawsuits begin. Being a superhero can be messy, involving lots of property destruction and plenty of injuries of bystanders (although, hopefully, few deaths). Once the incident where Mr. Incredible prevented a suicide but injured the man in the process sets a precedent that superheroes can be sued, suddenly it's the new growth industry for trial lawyers. Ultimately the government steps in, grants a general amnesty to the superheroes, but puts them in a Superhero Protection Program, requiring them to adopt new civilian identities and hide their powers, never to live the life of superpowered vigilantes again.
And somehow the world stays saved for fifteen years. (And I never could hear that phrase without thinking of
important theological questions.)
While it seems like the world manages to chug on without superpowered help, the superpowered help isn't doing so well without the world. Despite their best efforts to fit in, Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl, now Bob and Helen Par (I believe I've got the names right), are finding it difficult. Bob especially doesn't enjoy working as an insurance claims agent, where he gets in trouble when he helps his clients a little bit too well, directing them to loopholes so they are covered better than the company wants to cover them. Meanwhile, Helen has her hands full with the kids, as it turns out that superpowered parents produce superpowered kids. Helen, aka Elastigirl, can stretch into almost any shape, and, as I mentioned, Mr. Incredible has superstrength, but the abilities of the kids don't have much relation to their parents' super-abilities. The son, Dash, who's about 11, has superspeed, and is frustrated that he's never allowed to put his abilities to good use, as his parents won't let him join the track team, even if he promises to slow it down. Violet, whom I think is in ninth grade and is something of a shy wallflower, has the power of invisibility (although it doesn't affect her clothes), and in the tradition of the Fantastic Four, she can also produce a force field, even though there's no clear connection between force fields and invisibility. The baby, Jack-jack, has no obvious power, but I didn't believe he was normal for a second. While Mom is trying to discipline Dash for using his abilities to get away with mischief, Dad is only encouraging him. Dash complains that he has to pretend he's not special, to which Mom replies, "Everyone's special, Dash." This brings a great rejoinder from Dash, "Which is just another way of saying that nobody is." That, in a nutshell, is the dilemma. Clearly, the whole family has extraordinary abilities, and clearly they're frustrated at having to hide those abilities and being unable to use them to do extraordinary things, but are those abilities a license to behave in ways ordinary civilians could not?
Whether or not such actions are justified, when Mr. Incredible gets a chance to play superhero again he jumps at it, even if he has to hide it from his family, and for a while things go well, despite the fact that he's out of practice and out of shape. But as you might expect, things eventually go bad, and it's up to his family to rescue him.
Unfortunately, "as you might expect" turns out to be the operative term in this movie. I found the plot to be largely predictable, with only a couple of minor twists that I didn't see coming half an hour beforehand. But then, I'm largely able to predict the plots of most movies. I figured out the big twist at the end of
Sixth Sense about halfway through. That doesn't prevent this movie from being a lot of fun.
The rescue makes for a couple of really cool scenes. The first is when Elastigirl repeats a mission that we've already seen Mr. Incredible perform, and we see how they approach the same problems in different ways. The second is when the kids, supposedly safely hidden, find themselves in trouble and have to learn the full extent of their powers, which they've long been lectured not to use, on the fly. Watching them do so is a lot of fun, reminiscent of my favorite scenes in the first Spiderman, as Peter Parker discovers his powers.
Aside from Mr. Incredible and his immediate family (the Incredibles), there are also a number of other characters. Edna, the fashion designer who makes the superhero outfits, is especially fun. Mr. Incredible asks her to repair a tear in his suit, and she gets carried away and creates outfits for the whole family. Usually superhero outfits get short-shrift, but with characters who can stretch, or turn invisible, or run at supersonic speeds, you have to design outfits that complement those abilities, and I'm glad to see that the writers not only explained this but had fun with the character, too. Another fun character is Frozone, the only friend whom Mr. Incredible maintains contact with from the old days, and he has a similarly hard time letting go of the glory days. His ice abilities are similar to the X-Men's Iceman. Finally, there is the villain, Syndrome, whose fifteen-year-old grudge and egomania nearly destroys the family and threatens plenty of innocent civilians in the process. He relies on superscience, lacking superpowers of his own.
The movie is action-packed and violent. The violence is about on the level of, say,
Star Wars, where a lot of bad people die in fiery explosions, but there is no gore or blood. A lot of good people die as well, but mostly people we've never met and well off-camera. Still, I wouldn't recommend this for really young children.
As with all Pixar films, it is computer-animated. And also as with all Pixar films, you hardly notice. The characters are cartoonishly rendered, the most impressive feature being the hair, which is beautiful, but you only notice it if you know how difficult it is to do with computer animation. With all the superpowers and superscience, you need to have super special effects, and from Frozone's ice blasts to Violet's forcefields, they're all beautifully rendered. But, as I said, the better the special effects are, the less they draw your attention of being cool special effects rather than just cool.
In summary, this is a fun movie and well worth seeing. It's not for small children, but kids about the same age as Dash and Violet should enoy it. I'm already looking forward to the sequel. For that matter, I'm trying to come up with a good excuse to see this one again.
