MegaMind
Much as I love the genre, I have two big problems with superheroes.
The first is that as a genre it is fragile, like a soap bubble. If
you look at it too closely; say by asking questions regarding the
existence of powers, the ethics of vigilantism, how the existence of
even one such individual would impact civilization as we know it, how
ordinary law enforcement can be so useless; the bubble pops. The only
way to truly make it work is to embrace it as the fantasy it is, and
even then it is a strain.
The other problem is, I believe, the superhero genre is suffering the
same fate that the western suffered in the sixties. It’s grown stale,
we keep trying to shake it up in different ways – be it revisionism,
deconstructionism, postmodernism – in the end it’s no use… even the
jokes, when we do a parody, are cliché. This brings us to
DreamWorks’s latest animated feature: Megamind.
It must be hard to do a super hero movie these days. I’m not talking
about the obvious problems with special effects convincing us such a
world exists, modern technology has that covered. It is because
Hollywood is trying to sell it to as large an audience as possible;
most of whom are not familiar with it, while the core audience, comic
book fans, have heard it all before. Unfortunately, this is the
weight that Megamind must bear.
To a certain extent, the main plot is actually about the problems I
have mentioned. The main characters seem to know they’re in a rut to
the point where they just aren’t trying. The damsel in distress has
been captured so many times that she isn’t impressed by any of the
villain’s threats, and when the paradigm changes nobody knows what to
do. So, all in all, the plot of MegaMind is all about what happens
next. The main character, wonderfully voiced by Will Ferrell, doesn’t
have a clue. After his first victory he goes on a childish binge of
relatively petty mayhem and larceny, but at the end of the day he’s
sitting alone with his loot and missing the old days.
What happens over the rest of the movie is Megamind trying to fill
that void, which leads to him making the mistake of trying to recreate
the old days, all of which snowballs and brings us to the exciting
climax. For the most part I enjoyed Megamind (other than 3-D induced
eyestrain). It has good design and model work (my only real problem
was all of the eyes were too reflective, as if they were made of
glass).
The animation is up to DreamWorks usual standards. The action scenes
were well choreographed and followed DreamWorks’ current formula, as
seen in its recent comedies, of being done completely straight. All
in all I’ll put this one at the same level as “Monsters vs. Aliens”; a
solid journeyman piece, and yet another step in DreamWorks’ recovery
from its earlier model of star-driven pop-reference-dependent formula
pieces.
