Missing Link

The Good:
This film has such a strong opening. The scene is immediately captivating. The dialogue is so strong, so compelling, with such a charming cadence that I wondered, “Is this adapted from a novel?” (It is not, but the screenplay must read like a storybook.)

Hugh Jackman is just delightful as Sir Lionel Frost, an explorer who’s a mashup of Sherlock Holmes, Indiana Jones, and anyone who’s ever been denied admission to an exclusive explorers’ club in Victorian London. (Have you ever noticed that last thing comes up disproportionately often in children’s fiction?) There’s a lovely musicality to Jackman’s voice work that makes me wish I had seen him on stage. And he’s given fantastic dialogue that sounds like it was ripped from a beloved children’s novel. (To be clear, I’m not accusing writer/director Chris Butler of plagiarism. I’m complimenting his screenplay.)

The opening sequence is so strong that even if the end credits had rolled immediately afterward, I would have left the theater satisfied, thinking, “Wow!  Ten minutes is short for a feature film, but that sure was twelve dollars well spent!”  (As if I pay for only my own ticket when we take our children to a movie! I wish!)

That opening scene let me know that even if my son didn’t want to watch a movie about non-Nintendo Link, I did.  Jackman’s performance alone is worth the price of admission. 

All of the performances in are good in Missing Link, actually, but Jackman’s is conspicuously the best. I was also incredibly impressed with Zach Galifianakis as Susan (aka Mr. Link). (Surely his choice of name intentionally honors Monsters Versus Aliens.)  This is an unusually restrained, pleasant Zach Galifianakis. The voice he gives the character is perfect. He brings a winning, wholesome innocence to the role and never tries to make the Sasquatch frightening, crude, or ridiculous (temptation resisted by too few animated films). Children definitely responded positively to the lovable character.  I liked him, too.

My daughter absolutely adored Zoe Saladana’s portrayal of widowed adventurer and budding feminist Adelina Fortnight. We also loved Timothy Olyphant as the nefarious Willard Stenk, a character who could be a forgettable villain, but is played instead with surprising richness and humor. (Well, I guess it’s not actually surprising. We’re huge fans of Santa Clarita Diet and actually love Timothy Olyphant in everything.)

Stephen Fry (who seems like a perfect fit for this project’s sense of humor) makes the increasingly unhinged Lord Piggot-Dunceby both genuinely menacing and hilariously mockable.  Matt Lucas is refreshingly downplayed as his colleague/valet(?)/henchman/sidekick/hostage(?) Mr. Collick.  (Sometimes Matt Lucas annoys me, though he is in my favorite scene of Paddington, another children’s film about somebody denied admission to an exclusive explorers’ club in London.)

David Walliams is such a delight as Mr. Lemuel Lint that I wish he were in the story longer. Ching Valdes-Aran and Amrita Acharia are very funny together. And Emma Thompson is laugh-out-loud hilarious.  She gets all the best lines in the movie.  She’s so funny.

The animation is marvelous, too. Stop motion always fascinates me with its meticulous attention to detail. This film also incorporates CGI to create some amazingly inventive scenes. The action sequences look impossibly difficult to achieve, especially the stuff on the boat. They’re all quite well done. And I love the way the story gives us so many truly different environments, such a diverse group of settings and such varied ways of revealing those settings to us.

I liked Carter Burwell’s score, too.

Best Scene:
I think I would have to award best scene to my son for the scene he made when we ran out of popcorn. Fortunately for the sanity of everyone in our screening, my husband went out to get him more. Even more fortunately, he returned just seconds after my son announced mysteriously, “I’ll be right back,” and started wandering disconcertingly toward the aisle.

But the best scene in the movie came at another time my husband was away (discovering that, apparently, our son will use public restrooms, after all, if you dangle him by the armpits rather than recommending the seat).

The brawl in the saloon is absolutely hilarious. Some of the fight choreography is way more inventive than I expected. Missing Link always goes out if its way to add little flourishes of welcome humor. If omitted, these subtle touches would not be missed which is part of what makes their inclusion so wonderful. Nothing feels lazy about this film. It is clearly a labor of love.

I was semi-heartbroken that my husband and son missed literally the entire scene in the bar. It’s so charming, the moment when the movie hits its stride, and perhaps the only portion of the film that seems perfectly paced.

Runner-up is the movie’s opening action sequence, extremely solid and oh-so whimsically wonderful.

Best Scene Visually:
Some of the establishing shots in this film are incredible in the most literal sense of the word. Looking at them, I could not believe the animators had achieved the visuals I was seeing using stop motion. I began to ask myself, “Is this actually stop motion animation? Did I just make an incorrect assumption based on Laika’s previous animated features like Coraline, ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, Kubo and the Two Strings?” I associate Laika exclusively with stop motion work, but I honestly didn’t believe some of the visuals in this film could have been created by that method.

I was hoping the closing credits would follow a Laika tradition and show us a time-lapse clip of the movie being made. And indeed, we do get a brief clip of a scene in production. Based on what I saw in that (too) brief glimpse, I now have the impression that the character animation is stop motion while many backgrounds the characters move through are computer generated/enhanced.

Missing Link gives us so many unique vistas. Disorienting aerial shots, arrivals at new locales shown from unusual angles, so many different kinds of flowers brightening up the corners of the screen.

Though my favorite visual is that all-too-brief behind-the-scenes clip during the credits, next most I loved all of the creative establishing shots. (So many angles! So many flowers!) Also, I am a huge fan of this film’s extreme commitment to visual humor. Though the dialogue is delicious, almost all of the best jokes are rather subtle sight gags. I especially love the movie’s embrace of consequences, its commitment to following through. It doesn’t let things drop. It asks, “After that random thing happens, then what?” (For example, if you throw an axe at someone, and you miss, now your opponent has an axe. Also, if someone big sits down, someone little flies up. If you drive a carriage through the mud, mud flies everywhere. And when you throw a punch at a live opponent, you can expect an answering blow. So better play it safe and punch a moose.)

I do love one moment of Susan staring at himself that reminded me so much of The Last Jedi that I wondered if the Star Wars reference was intentional.  (Even the score at this point sounds a little Star Warsy.)

Best Action Sequence:
I love the seasick energy of the ever churning chase through the bowels of the ship. This sequence seems like a clear homage to the movie Inception, just as most of the travel scenes lovingly wink at the Indiana Jones franchise. (Missing Link basically compresses all Indiana Jones adventures into one.  Again and again, well known elements from those movies come into play.  If I explicitly call out all the similarities, I will essentially be spoiling the entire plot of this movie.)

Funniest Scene:
The visual jokes are actually best, but Emma Thompson’s character gets the wittiest lines, hands down. One of her lines is so good that I started to wonder if maybe she polished the script herself. (Note, I have absolutely no evidence that this is the case. I just know she’s a great writer, and what she says here is so absurdly witty.)

It is Susan’s farewell to Thompson’s character that got the biggest laugh in our theater, however. All the kids went nuts. The reaction was huge. The auditorium was extremely far from full, but it sounded like two thousand children laughed out loud at that point.

Another (semi-related) late moment is meant to be serious. Some characters are in extreme peril. (That’s putting it mildly.) What happens is dark and terrible. (Not as dark as the end of The Boxtrolls, but just as fatal, surely.) My three-year-old burst out laughing. He clapped and cheered. He later said this was the only part he liked in the entire movie. (Of course, keep in mind that he wanted to watch the adventures of an entirely different Link. We took him to the wrong movie, and he never stopped resenting that, though he was able to block out many of his darkest emotions with popcorn.)

The Negatives:
Even though I really like Zoe Saldana, I thought the majority of scenes involving her character, Adelina Fortnight, suffered from the film’s most conspicuous pacing problems. The character’s behavior seemed a bit problematic to me, too. For much of the movie, I thought, “I can see where this is going! That’s kind of annoying and clichéd!” Then at the end, I puzzled to myself, “Huh! It didn’t go that way, after all! That seems like a progressive, less annoying choice. So why am I even more annoyed now?”

Their dynamic is fun to think about (even if it’s not all that exciting to watch). Frost begins by seeing Adelina as a failed conquest, then as a means to an end. But by the time they’re adventuring together, he starts to view her as a prize to be won, something as precious as a rare discovery or a coveted membership. He accepts her criticisms because he thinks she’s implicitly offering him something more than criticism. Instead of looking for validation from a bunch of jerks, he chooses to look to her for validation. In the end, he thinks he has fulfilled all her requirements. He has turned away from a former goal because he has decided to win her instead. But Frost is assuming a lot.

Now, before I go further, I should point out that my daughter loved Adelina. When I asked if she had a favorite scene, she replied, “Can I give a favorite character instead? I just love Adelina!”  (“No character for me!” her little brother chimed in pointedly. “I liked nothing, and my favorite character was no one.  Write that everywhere.”)

My daughter explained that Adelina “is not like a lot of other female characters because she gets to do stuff.” She added that she was thrilled the movie did not go a certain way because “so many movies just force that in.” And she emphatically reminded me many times, “He was her ex, and he used to be a big part of her life, but he didn’t even go to her husband’s funeral.  Her husband, who used to be his friend, was dead, and he did not even go to the man’s funeral.”

I see why my daughter likes the Adelina character. She likes her for all the reasons we’re supposed to like her. And I like her, too, as far as that goes. She’s courageous and kind, and her dress is such a gorgeous, vibrant purple.

What bothers me is not who the character is, but, rather, the way she is used.

Adelina is supposed to be a real woman who doesn’t exist just to motivate some man. But she does exist in this story just to motivate some man! That is her entire role in the story. She makes Frost aware of his shortcomings and motivates him to be a better person. That is all she does (besides have a map). (Even that seems like a metaphor. Adelina will show you the way!)

So I mean, the movie lets her tell us that she’s more than just an extension of some man. She has her own story. But then the movie shows us nothing but her prodding and shaping Frost. Her own story is not told in this movie at all. I feel writer/director Chris Butler wants to have his cake and eat it, too. Like yes, we are still going to use the female co-star in the same tired ways, but then we’re going to say that we’re not doing that because yea, feminism!

None of this is really a huge problem. In fact, I like the idea that a man is better off imitating the fine qualities of a woman and a Sasquatch than trying to adopt the values of a stagnant boys’ club that is mismanaging the world.  And she’s not really used in all of the old, tired ways.  She’s also used in some of the newer tired ways.  She’s reasonably good at saving herself sometimes.

The problem is that I had so long to think about Adelina’s role in the story. Often when she is on the screen trying to make Frost into a better man, nothing else is happening. The pace of the story slows down. Way, way down. The scenes lose tension, lose energy. Even though the protagonists are running across the entire world pursued by a relentless murderer, it feels like nothing is happening.  Everything becomes slow and vague.

This issue was particularly highlighted for me because thanks to our son, my husband missed almost every exciting part of this movie. “Oh! He’s missing the good part!” I would think again and again. Then he would return, and suddenly nothing would happen for several minutes. It shouldn’t be so easy to miss every good part of a movie. Ideally, the whole movie should be good.

My husband even noted that he found the movie slow (not surprising since he missed some of the best scenes), but that he didn’t particularly mind because he liked the stop motion, the gentle humor, the excellent dialogue, and the endearing characters. I felt the same way. Even slow, the movie is good, but if it could keep its pace and energy level more consistent, it would be better.  That’s all I’m saying.

Another (related) thing that bothered me is that supposedly the three adventures are forced to travel across the entire Continental United States by stage coach, and yet nothing changes in their group dynamic during this entire time. I felt that after such a long (off-screen) journey, the way they interacted (or at the very least their clothes) should have changed a little! Of course, Adelina does tell us some things that happened on the trip. Whenever the writer wants something made known, he has Adelina tell everyone. I wish Frost could have made some of his breakthroughs and changes through a process of self-discovery instead of just responding to Adelina as if she were a character designed to give him hints to keep him pointed in the right direction in a video game.

Still I liked the movie enough that I would watch a sequel (though I doubt they’ll make one), and I hope that sequel would include the return of Adelina.

Overall:
If you ask me, Missing Link is incredibly charming. (Better not ask my son, though. This film is not about Link from the Zelda games, and he will never give it a fair review until that changes.) The movie does have its weak points, but they really don’t matter. Its sweet, inoffensive humor is so winning, and some of the dialogue is genuinely clever. The ending gets a bit dark for some, but both my husband and son liked that part best, and honestly, it could be far darker. (Nobody explodes in a grotesque orgy of cheese consumption, for example.) Honestly this is probably the mildest, least frightening film Laika has ever made. I really enjoyed it and wouldn’t be sorry to see it nominated for an Oscar.