For a film four years in the making, Dead Reckoning doesn’t half land with peculiar resonance. This is the seventh in the Mission: Impossible film saga and first of a two-part extravaganza. It’s a blockbuster concerned with the perils of artificial intelligence, released in sync with the launch of Hollywood’s biggest strike in sixty years. A strike pitted against exactly that threat. Moreover, here is a feature driven, in part, by the hunt for a mysteriously missing submarine. This mere weeks after the Titan’s disappearance gripped the globe. It’s enough to make even Tom Cruise wrinkle an eyebrow, were he not behind a picket line somewhere, of course. And yet, for all this talk of contemporaneous thematic severity, where Dead Reckoning really proves itself in step with audiences of the here and now is in its recognising today’s want for escapist spectacle. That it delivers in spades.
Looking back – almost three decades back – virtually nothing in the latest feature from Pixar could have been achieved at the dawn of computer animation. Certainly not with any credibility. In Elemental, the studio’s first all out cinema original since 2020’s Onward, flames lick the air with every smoking flicker. People made entirely of water osmose seamlessly in and out of photo real canals, while folk of bark and foliage sprout bright and casually stunning floristry from their branch pits. It’s as though one could reach forth and pluck petals from the screen itself. These days, Toy Story’s groundbreaking animation looks little more than child’s play in comparison. Elemental hasn’t the emotional gut-wrenchary of that original masterpiece but proves, twenty-seven films on, that Pixar still rides a wave of its innovative own even now.
DreamWorks’ latest feature comes billed as John Hughes for kids but delivers Pixar for amnesiacs. That’s not to say the film is bad by any means. Heck, word vomit title aside, Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken even boasts bursts of fleeting brilliance. And yet, where it stumbles is in comparison to the better offerings it recalls. From Turning Red is plundered a somewhat clunky metaphor for puberty. From Luca comes the notion of sea monsters living on land and the down low. If all you can add is a bland pop soundtrack, why bother? It’s almost tragic to note that, owing to pandemic restrictions, Ruby Gillman will easily surpass its superior forebears’ stringent box office returns.
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