Mark Reviews Movies: STRANGE WORLD

Strange World, Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 22, 2022

Strange World offers up a few promises with its simple story and fantastical setting. Those promises aren't much in the grand scheme of things, since they basically amount to the idea of a grand adventure in an alien locale. The prologue of director Don Hall's movie certainly suggests the filmmakers are aware of both the limits and the possibilities of their premise. As for the rest of the movie, it struggles to live up to the standard it establishes.

That prologue tells the tale of an isolated land, surrounded by a ring of impassable mountains, and the intrepid adventurer who has made it his life's goal to find a way past the mountains, in order to see what lies beyond them. The guy even has a theme song, which accompanies a comic book-style montage of the exploits of Jaeger Clade (voice of Dennis Quaid) and his son Searcher (voice of Jake Gyllenhaal)—whose own theme tune is a bit less impressive (The kid has a tendency to get stuck in quicksand and looks quite terrified while swinging on vines next to his old man). At the start, Hall and screenwriter Qui Nguyen (also serving as a co-director on the movie) show just the right level of winking in their obvious admiration for the stuff of those old serial adventure stories.

Father and son lead an expedition to find a pass through the mountains, and the introduction ends with Searcher, by this point a young man, discovering a mysteriously glowing plant, filled with green energy. He decides that a bright future for their secluded land might be achieved by harnessing this power. The stubborn and fearless Jaeger, though, decides to continue on his way through the perilous mountains, looking for a future for his home in that great unknown.

Twenty-five years pass. Searcher has become a simple farmer of the energy-producing plant and a living legend for his discovery, which has transformed this realm from a horse-and-buggy kind of place into one with advanced technology. There's even a statue of him in the city square—right next to one of his father, who hasn't been seen or heard from since he set out on his own. Searcher is just trying to live a humble life with his wife Meridan (voice of Gabrielle Union) and teenage son Ethan (voice of Jaboukie Young-White), who has dreams of adventure—despite or because of his own father's attitude on such things.

After the glowing plants start dying, the family ends up on an expedition, led by Calisto (voice of Lucy Liu). The mission is to find the source of the plant, in the hopes of finding out what might be killing it, and in the process, the team discovers a hidden land within the mountains and beneath the world as they know it. As it turns out, Jaeger found his way there, too, all those years ago, and that means a rather uncomfortable family reunion.

So much of Nguyen's screenplay is spent establishing all of this—from the workings of the world, to the dynamics of the family, to the various complications that constantly arise and need to be solved—that there's very little room, time, or, apparently, patience for any sense of discovery. Part of the issue is that hidden world.

It's filled with brightly colored flora and fauna, and the almost-neon color palette of it looks and feels aesthetically indistinct and messy. The few moments in which the story pauses to observe and attempt to marvel at the place never land as a result of that and how everything appears to be more of a design choice than some competent of coherent world-building (A character jokes about wanting to merchandise a cute-ish blob creature, and one can't help but suspect that alleged in-joke is actually part of the bigger marketing plan for the movie).

Mostly, though, the problem is the story's rush to keep things moving, no matter how repetitive that constant motion feels. That's especially true of the movie's action sequences, which amount to multiple chases—in a giant airship or on bulky motorcycles away from those bland creatures—and fending off waves of flying and tentacled beasts. We don't expect much from or about these characters, since that prologue does such a good job establishing them as archetypes, so the efforts to dig into some kind of inherent, inter-generational rebellion comes across as forced. There's a similar feeling when the filmmakers arrive at the big thematic point, an on-the-nose environmental allegory that feels both reductive and redundant (This world is a "living thing," one character notes, as that basic fact of ecosystems is made literal here).

Speaking of reductive arguments, it would be one to say that Strange World doesn't work simply because the movie isn't much fun. For assorted reasons and since the movie itself establishes the promise of that early on, though, that is, to put it bluntly, the simple truth of the matter.

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