Hear Me Out: Incredibles 2 is a Well-Made Lazy Sequel (Retrospective)
114Hey everyone! Just to reiterate what I say at the beginning of this video, I realised I have a lot more to say about animated movies than I thought. There's a lot in this video that I'm aware many other people have said before, but here I decided to talk about pretty much every issue I have with the movie. It's basically a long rant and a little different to the usual. I also wanna make it clear that I do still enjoy this movie, despite its issues. Next video I upload will likely be a game review again (the script is pretty much finished so it might not be too long away) but if you do wanna see more stuff like this as well, let me know. I would actually like to do more videos on some animated movies in future, so hope you enjoy it either way.
TIMESTAMPS: I decided to divide this video up into chapters. While initially these were all points to corroborate my claim that the movie is ‘well-made but lazy’, some just represent issues I have with the movie. Chapter 6, for example, isn’t really much of a comment on the movie’s laziness, but gender stereotyping/representation. Either way, I felt it made sense to punctuate the video a little. I often go off on a tangent in these and don't always stick to the topic of the chapter title, but I tried to make it flow as best as I could.
0:00 – Introduction
1:26 – 1. The Incredibly Lazy Set-Up – discussion on the movie’s opening scenes and why they’re effective but lazy
4:45 – 2. The Jack-Jack Rehash
5:54 – 3. The Problem With The Screenslaver – discussion on her weak motive and underused “powers” in the latter stages of the movie
8:56 – 4. The Villain’s Plot Is Ill-Conceived – discussion on the villain’s nonsensical plot, anticlimactic finale, and underused supers
13:41 – 5. Deus Ex Jack-ina: Cars, Babies and Contrivances
14:54 – 6. Mr Un-Incredible: Subjugation of the Super-Men – discussion on the representation of men, as well as some miscellaneous comments on other characters
19:05 – 7. A Hurried Happy Ending – brief discussion on the movie’s rushed ending
20:00 – 8. Conclusion
Notes: (minor spoilers for video)
8:53: Regarding chapter 3 – I feel that maybe my point gets lost a little here as chapter 3 merges with chapter 4 quite a bit, but I’m essentially saying that, while I do have an issue with these motives, I think it’s her failure to utilise her ‘hypnotic abilities’ to their full potential that makes the movie’s climactic scenes feel lacklustre.
9:55: I’ve been seriously racking my brain over this as I genuinely can’t think of an explanation for Evelyn’s actions that doesn’t raise more questions. By inflicting these attacks, I guess she was attempting to draw media/public attention to Elastigirl, gaining enough publicity to make supers legal before purposely making them appear untrustworthy/making it look like a major betrayal. But this still doesn’t make sense to me since she clearly does not want or expect to be found out. Or maybe she was simply found out earlier than she wanted to be – perhaps she would have set her plans in motion on the yacht anyway if she hadn’t been discovered. Either way, there’s no real need for her to incriminate herself by hijacking a train and a helicopter, and setting off a bomb, when it would have been more beneficial to her cause if she’d have done nothing and waited for the right moment to slap the goggles on Elastigirl. Besides, supers already had a lot of media attention at this time – positive attention for having destroyed the Omnidroid, and negative attention for the Underminer incident. Nothing Evelyn does works in her favour. I appreciate that she’s trying to garner positive attention from the public, but Elastigirl would likely have received this anyway. To make things even more confusing, the fact that the media gives supers any positive attention at all is also somewhat questionable considering their illegality.
Sources for the quotes and clips I used:
Villain motivation: https://www.reddit.com/r/fixingmovies/comments/8tbjpo/simple_fixes_to_incredibles_2_by_changing_the/
Dash: https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/iqv0it/i_enjoyed_incredibles_2_when_i_first_watched_it/
https://www.reddit.com/r/CharacterRant/comments/jssnc4/incredibles_2_was_a_disappointing_rehash_and/
Underminer: https://www.reddit.com/r/Incredibles2/comments/8uy81w/what_about_the_underminer/
Guardian Review: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jul/15/incredibles-2-review-mark-kermode
Portal Gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0P2dzIa6pZY&t=1544s
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Special thanks to my patrons - there may not be any extra stuff this month, but I'm gonna piece together some deleted stuff from this video, as well as a few parts of the video I briefly show at the start of this review. I can't say exactly when they'll go up, but that's the plan over the next couple of weeks.
Thanks for watching everyone!
Michael