Robin Love

I love pretty much every Pixar and Disney movie. This one, not so much. The 3D animation is beautiful and the voice acting is superb. I watched this with my gifted 10 year old and I don’t think this is a great movie for kids. I also think it could be triggering for those struggling with depression. Here are the issues I have with it: 1) The callous treatment of death. The main character falls down a hole on what he thinks is going to be the best day of his life and bam, he’s on his way to the afterlife. Talk about depressing. 2) The introduction of the afterlife and before life concepts is problematic for me. If you have taught your children anything about why we exist, etc. this film has to be explained away as fiction, a discussion I would rather not have because of a kids movie that gets it wrong. 3) There are some definitely scary elements in this movie - the lost souls are giant scary-looking things and 22’s own voice to herself in her head turns into giant monster-size people talking at her. 4) The main character, 22, is a soul that doesn’t want to go to Earth. She doesn’t feel a “spark” about doing anything that people do. Similar to “What’s the point?” I found this very triggering as a person with depression. This does resolve during the movie once she has a chance to visit Earth, but not enough to outweigh the depressive nature of the previous movie scenes. 5) There were lots of adult jokes throughout, but not much humor for kids. The ONLY light-hearted part of the movie was when the main characters were put into the wrong bodies, which I’ve noticed other adults are criticizing. Without that part, the whole movie would have been depressing. 6) The movie has the word “hell” in it. I’ve never told my son that’s a bad word, but it must be a bad word at school because he was aghast at the use of the word in the movie. So that happened. Sigh... 7) Finally, there’s about 20-30 minutes toward the beginning of the movie - the afterlife/before life part - that feels totally psychedelic - I imagine this movie will have a cult following with drug users. Again, not really what I’m looking for in a movie for my kid. I hope someone finds my review helpful.

Meh. With all of the hype, I was expecting much more. I think the idea was good, but the execution was flawed. There were so many accents, the dialogue wasn’t good, and the dialogue volume was often drowned out by the background noise, so it was difficult to follow what the characters were even saying, let alone trying to follow the time-warping concept. If it wasn’t for John David Washington, this film would have been terrible. Washington’s performance was excellent and made the story more believable. But the script was terrible. It even made Kenneth Branagh sound like a bad actor. And the female lead role (not the actress herself, who was fine) was not likable at all - difficult to believe the protagonist was driven to save this woman more than saving the world - I don’t think so. The special effects were amazing. So if you like action and don’t particularly care about the dialogue, this is worth seeing. If you are more into the mind-bending aspects being touted, you’ll be disappointed.