Rating: PG
Runtime: 1 hour, 29 minutes
Director: Nick Park
Quick Impressions:
My entire family is dying to see Black Panther, but we’re waiting until our fifteen-year-old can join us next weekend.
Meanwhile, we’re also huge fans of Aardman. The Curse of the Were-Rabbit remains the best surprise we ever received at the movies. Thirteen years ago, my then boyfriend (now husband) and I accidentally showed up at the wrong theater (which was not playing Oliver Twist), took a chance on the full length Wallace and Gromit outing, and were bowled over by what became our favorite film of 2005. Honestly that movie still makes me laugh hysterically. I just love it, the spooky atmosphere, the cute bunnies, the zany humor. Even now, every time somebody yells, “Ahhhh!” one of us is likely to mimic Helena Bonham Carter’s Lady Tottington and exclaim, “But I can’t wait an hour! I have a major infestation!” (That joke doesn’t really work in print. I considered spelling it “hahhhhr,” but that just looks silly.)
Anyway, Early Man is definitely not as good as The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (but I mean, what could be?).
It should, however, win a prize for most strategically deceptive preview. I mean that as a compliment. Those marketing the film were very clever since I’d imagine many Americans would not be terribly interested in seeing Early Man if the trailer had revealed the central concern of the actual plot.
The Good:
So I’m pretty sure this entire movie evolved from a funny pun that popped into someone’s head. Late in the film, a hilarious character voiced by Rob Brydon (beloved to my family thanks to his work on one of the few shows we all enjoy, Gavin and Stacey) gets this great little joke about how all the cave men are working together. It’s just a one-liner, really just a pun, but that pun seems to be the concept for the entire movie in miniature. Maybe I should say it’s the justification for the movie. The film exists mainly to set up this clever play on words.
In other words, the entire movie is just one big absurd joke.
Most of the humor that works in the movie is absurd. We’re given a series of bizarre situations. That they’re occurring at all is the joke. In most cases, the dialogue is not all that clever, and even the slapstick bits are not consistent. But boy are those situations ever…odd.
Halfway through the film, I realized, This movie would be absolutely brilliant if only they had added a narrator.
Watch the events on screen. Then imagine them being described to you in a very calm, earnest, British narrator voice by maybe John Cleese (or anyone from Monty Python). With that small change, a movie that is merely pleasant and cute would become relentlessly hilarious. Because, you see, most of the time, what’s happening is absurd to the point of being incongruous with our understanding of reality.
Imagine a line like this, delivered calmly by John Cleese, “Unfortunately at that moment their only ball was trodden on by a very large duck.” That’s funny, right? No matter the context, that’s funny because there is no context that would make such an event not absurd.
So I would imagine that the screenplay for this film is a hilarious read, in all likelihood much funnier on the page than on the screen. It’s really too bad that there is no narrator describing to us what is going on as it happens.
And it’s probably no coincidence that the funniest part of the film comes near the end, when two commentators (both voiced by Rob Brydon) suddenly show up and begin to tell us what’s occurring. Too bad Brydon didn’t just narrate the entire movie.
As it is, Brydon plays like a million characters, and they’re all the funniest ones. His messenger bird is one of the comedic highlights of the film, too. What really makes this bit so funny is, again, that the entire concept is so absurd. I mean, yes, the idea of birds being used to send messages is obviously grounded in reality. But a bird that memorizes long speeches (or even multi-person conversations) word for word (and does the voices) and hurls fruit at you and squeezes your nose…?
To me one of the funniest aspects of the whole bird bit is the way the queen already knows everything (somehow). It’s all just so delightfully silly.
Other highlights of the film include some great vocal performances from a talented cast. Playing protagonist Dug, Eddie Redmayne sounds just perfect for an Aardman hero. There’s a wonderfully gentle, innocent, optimistic, unassuming quality to his line delivery that reminded me fondly of the way the late, great Peter Sallis voiced Wallace (of Wallace and Gromit). I can’t think of any actor more perfect for the part than Redmayne.
Tom Hiddleston is also hilariously perfect as Nooth, the iron age villain whose braggadocious performance and French-ish accent is obviously influenced by Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
As the chief, Timothy Spall gets a disproportionate number of actually funny lines and really makes them work.
My husband and I were delighted to hear Miriam Margolyes show up as the queen. We sat next to her at a West End production of Wicked on our Honeymoon once, and as often as we mention this, you’d assume it was the highlight of our lives. The queen has a great part because all she has to do is show up, and we’re already primed to find her hilarious.
On Game of Thrones and in life, there’s nothing not to love about Maisie Williams, but I found her accent here a bit distracting. I do like her character and her performance except for the accent (though this seems arbitrary and unfair even to me, the person making the complaint).
I particularly liked Selina Griffiths as Magma and marveled at how much of the humor of that character is visual. How is it possible to develop so much character using stop motion?
Funniest Scene:
The instant replay cracked me up. My husband, our nine-year-old daughter, and I were all laughing so hard as were many others in the audience.
And the massage scene, though clearly not as funny as it wants to be, delights by allowing us to anticipate ridiculous things before they happen. The moment when Hognob anxiously contemplates the harp is charming if not hilarious.
Best Scene Visually:
I’m extremely fond of the sequence when Dug cautions Hognob to remain silent and then (of course) noisily trips and falls and falls and falls…
Admittedly, this isn’t quite as funny as it wants to be, probably because the joke needs a few more levels of falling to sell it thoroughly. It’s kind of like Sideshow Bob stepping on the rakes, but I don’t think they prolong the falling quite long enough to get the audience reaction they’re going for.
(I keep saying “they” when I actually probably mean director Nick Park.)
This fall sequence would be fantastic as an endlessly looping gif, though. It’s a very unique way to fall, and it has such a soothing look. (It reminded me a little of the pleasure you feel when you set off a chain reaction of dominoes and watch them all collapse in turn.)
To achieve this look using stop motion must have been rather difficult. (Or maybe it was easy and perfectly suited to stop motion. Maybe that’s why they did it. I am terrible at anything that involves manipulating objects or imagining spatial relationships.)
Throughout the film, my daughter and I kept whispering to each other, marveling at the amount of invisible work that goes into stop motion.
Visually this movie is actually quite strong. Nick Park is the master of the medium. I love how funny and how human he makes the faces of his characters. They don’t even have to speak or do anything. They just stand there looking at us, and we get so strong an impression of who they are and what they’re feeling. I’m not sure how Park pulls that off in stop motion.
Best Action Sequence:
I love the gleeful energy of the rabbit hunt near the beginning of the film. This scene is genuinely funny throughout, though you can’t look away because it’s nearly entirely visual humor.
The scene pairs nicely with the big group effort at the end.
Best Scene:
I love the moment of horror in the cave. It’s a part of the movie that works without needing to be funny because, of course, what’s funny is the entire situation–funny to us, not at all to the characters. What horrors wait in the cave? With what psychological demon must the hero grapple? It’s a moment of genre mashup perfection.
The Negatives:
This is far from a bad movie. Its masterful use of stop motion alone is worth the price of a ticket (especially since my ticket cost nothing because my MoviePass subscription has already paid for itself).
It’s somehow not as funny as it ought to be, though. I would imagine it’s slightly funnier if you are British because there are probably nuances to the humor relating to this particular subject that I might have missed. (I do feel like I got most of the jokes, but I’ll acknowledge that they might resonate more with an audience strongly connected to the subject matter.)
Still, I really do think this entire movie spun out of one three word phrase, somebody’s oh-so-clever pun. I could be wrong, but the moment Rob Brydon’s character uttered that phrase, I thought, “Oh my God! That’s the raison d’être of this film. This entire movie is a dramatization of that joke!” (Did I really think raison d’être? I must be one of those people who glamorizes my recollections of myself! In the moment, I’m dropping greasy popcorn all over my shirt in the dark, and in my flashback, I’m thrilling others with my rapier wit as I enjoy a glass of wine during the intermission of La Traviata.)
So in a way, the whole film is a punchline, and that meta joke is really pretty great. But just on a story level, the movie needs more (and more consistent) humor. Also, the story (despite its self-consciously absurd and bizarre elements) is pretty trite and predictable in execution. I mean, the giant duck is weird, but what the giant duck causes/enables is exactly what we would expect in a story like this.
As I said, I think the film would be a million times funnier with a narrator. They might also have considered letting Rob Brydon play all the parts since all the parts he does play are conspicuously the funniest.
The flashes of comedic brilliance (such as the energy of the first bunny hunt) show that the movie does know how to fire on all cylinders. But why can’t every scene work as well as that one?
The end result is a family movie that is cute, occasionally funny, and consistently mildly entertaining, but, really, nothing special. (No, that seems harsh. It is special. It’s just not that good. Actually, that sounds even meaner. Let’s put it this way, Curse of the Were-Rabbit is an A+, and this movie is passing the same course, but only because it’s copying off one of the B students. Gosh, I’m just mean. I don’t intend to be.) This is not a great movie, but it is pretty cute. Let’s leave it at that.
Overall:
Early Man has a clever, unexpected premise, superlative stop motion, and some very funny moments. It’s definitely not the strongest Aardman film I’ve seen, but it’s a good way to spend a pleasant afternoon at the movie theater.