Runtime: 1 hour, 23 minutes
Rating: PG
Director: Roberts Gannaway
Quick Impressions:
I’m not a huge fan of Cars (though I liked it way better than Happy Feet, and I’m always up for a spin around Cars Land). I never even made an attempt to see the first Planes. And I’m sure I could have caught it with minimal effort because we have like twenty-five Disney Channels, and our kids watch Disney shows round the clock. (Seriously, we’re catching up on Dog with a Blog right now.)
I am, however, very familiar with Dusty Crophopper. For the past few weeks, my five-year-old has been riding him around the park just about every day. (She’s not a big Planes fan, either, but her favorite color is orange, and when she asked Santa for an orange bike, it was Dusty Crophopper or nothing.) The bike has a really cool propeller that spins like crazy when it catches the wind, so Santa made a good choice there, I think.
Let me be totally candid, though. Planes: Fire & Rescue is a movie about growing up and making responsible choices. Responsible planes know their limits. Responsible planes put the needs of others above their own whims. Responsible people do not take their five-year-old daughter to see Lucy because it’s rated R and it’s directed by Luc Besson, a known maniac with a gleeful love of disturbingly quick cuts of gruesome violence.
That’s the only reason I saw this movie. My husband and I wanted to see Lucy. My mother (our usual babysitter) is in the hospital in San Antonio with my dad. Planes: Fire & Rescue and Lucy began at the same time and ended within five minutes of one another. Even though my daughter let me know, “I could probably watch Lucy and not be scared as long as I know my Happy Meal is coming,” we decided to split up and take her to Planes: Fire & Rescue.
“Oh yes, I’ll be glad to watch that,” she decided, “because it will be very nice to know as much about it as” her brother. “He knows all about these Planes movies. He’ll be very surprised when he starts telling me about it, and I’ll say, ‘Yes, I know.’”
After the movie was over, I asked her, “Which one of the planes did you like the best?”
She answered, “Well, Dusty Crophopper, obviously, because, um,” a shrug, “he’s my bike.” Duh, Mom.
Now, I’m just trying to be honest when I say that if Dusty Crophopper is not your bike, you might not enjoy this movie. But surely they made a lot of those Dusty Crophopper bikes, so I’m confident the movie has a sizable fanbase and will in its own small way succeed regardless of the feelings of random disinterested thirty-five-year-old women who are clearly not the target audience.
The Good:
I’ll be the bluntest I’ve been yet.
For the first hour and twenty minutes, I did not like Planes: Fire & Rescue at all. But then (get ready for a shock) in the last three minutes, I suddenly thought, Wow! What a great message! This is a really edifying movie for little boys.
Little girls might like it, too, of course. (I certainly won’t stand in their way), but I do think most of the rabid fanbase is male. (I have met tons of little boys who are huge fans.)
More than anything, right of the bat, this reminded me incredibly of the Hallmark Hall of Fame movies that my Dad had been watching a lot recently, just before he left to get his liver transplant. We always DVR everything, so the TV downstairs is still tuned in to the Hallmark Channel, and I keep catching bits of pieces of these movies even now. (One seems to air way more often than the others. Either that or Candace Cameron is actually in all of them. I must say, she’s grown into a very charming woman, that Candace Cameron, a centered beauty who can melt even the hardest heart.) I should probably change the channel I guess, but every night, I enjoy seeing how many minutes of Golden Girls I can watch before my daughter notices that her show has ended and asks me to start another Dog with a Blog, so for now, we remain tuned in to Hallmark.
Anyway, anyone who has seen Cars knows that it’s basically Doc Hollywood with cars. So it seems like a natural progression that Planes 2 is basically a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie with planes.
For quite a long time, ageism was the major theme of the movie. All the Hallmark movies are obsessed with this theme, too. In the beginning, there’s some character who’s like, “Nothing gives me more pleasure than raking in money hand-over-fist, slighting the elderly, razing treasured institutions, slighting the elderly, neglecting children, slighting the elderly, and refusing to attend the church festival/county fair/recital at the preschool. P.S. Old people are worthless, especially if they’re not from the big city like me. Now excuse me while I go slight the elderly.” Then suddenly the person meets Candace Cameron, has an epic change of heart, and thinks, “Hmm, maybe being a complete jerk in all ways for no reason is not the way to live a meaningful life, after all. What a strange epiphany!”
It’s really funny in a movie where the protagonists are machinery that we get this message that age does not make someone less valuable. Older people are every bit as human and as valuable as they ever were, but old machines do break down and wear out. And cars don’t actually have souls, you know. Except for classic car enthusiasts, most people do prefer newer technology. So the analogy is never perfect. But you have to realize that most people who are really into this movie are probably three years old and really want to drive the fire truck. They are not consciously aware of any analogy, imperfect or otherwise.
By the end, though, Planes 2 won me over. It has a really solid moral, a lesson that will actually be quite edifying and useful to the little children watching.
Dusty Crophopper thinks that he can do anything. Then he finds out that his gear box is damaged. He needs a new one, but his particular make of gear box has been discontinued. He can no longer go full throttle (or whatever) because he will stop working and crash. He’s become aware of his own mortality, and it really freaks him out. He needs a new gear box. They search high and low for it. They have to find it somewhere. Until he gets a new gear box, he can’t race.
Then as you might expect, he behaves like a reckless, self-centered jerk, does something stupid and ends up hurting all his friends. His friend the antique fire truck ends up feeling old and useless and worn out and good for nothing, so Dusty decides to become a rescue plane to help buoy his friend’s spirits (and so their airport can stay open because he’s made a mess of things for everyone).
Dusty is young and foolish and reckless and stubborn and unwilling to take correction and terrified that he has limits and unable to face this for most of the movie. But then a bunch of stuff happens, and he realizes that he does have limits. Everyone does. He may not be new and perfect as he was, but that’s okay.
He basically begins by thinking that being amazing is the only way to have any value. At one point, he looks at the board of pictures of heroes at his new job, and he asks someone, “What do you have to do to get your picture up there?”
His companion replies grimly, “Crash.”
Right away my daughter lit up. “Oh! He can do that with no problem!” she said. “He’s already crashed before. He knows exactly to crash. It will be easy for him.”
At first I just thought she was cute. But then as the story took shape, I began to realize that moral-wise, it was quite well crafted. If Dusty wants to be a hero with a famous legacy, he can push himself past his limits, crash, and be immortalized as someone who died young in a blaze of glory. That’s a legitimate choice. If he wants to continue living, though, he’s got to find out what life is actually about. The people who are not heroes are not worthless. They are the ones who didn’t die young and learned how to continue living in imperfect bodies under imperfect circumstances in an imperfect world.
As the movie goes on, he learns that so many of the older planes around him have tons of emotional baggage and physical hardships. They have learned how to live with them and keep going anyway.
By the time we get to the end of the movie, Dusty realizes that what he’s been hoping for all this time is actually not as good as what he ultimately gets.
This is a really good lesson in how to grow up. If you want to be a hero, you don’t have to know exactly what you’re doing. You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to be the star who is in control of every situation. Sometimes being a hero means recognizing your limitations and putting the needs of others before your own ego. Getting old isn’t a sign of failure. It’s a sign of success. Life experience is a good thing. It shapes you into the person you become. Old people are not a separate species. They’re you in the future. The difference is, they’ve managed to survive longer than you have. Success in life is a bit different in reality than in youthful daydreams of future glory.
Children do not know this yet. There’s no way that they possibly could. But if you’re very young and want to be a hero like Dusty, the lesson he learns might rub off on you a bit, and it’s a legitimately useful lesson.
Best Scene Visually:
I never engaged with the movie at all (though I was trying) until Dusty Crophopper flew off to rescue plane training. The montage of him flying across the country was a pleasure to watch simply because it looked so good. (The music was nice, too.) Who doesn’t love beautiful scenery? The animation in this sequence in superb. There are a couple of shots of grass blowing in the wind that look simply gorgeous and entirely real.
This is the caliber of movie that usually airs first on the Disney Channel. When I was a kid, this kind of movie would go direct to video or to spend maybe one week in some sketchy theater before appearing in discount bins nationwide. There’s one important difference, though. The animation is absolutely stunning. The production value is about twenty-million times higher than anything comparable made in the 1980s. It’s a shame that the script is so lacking, but the target audience is probably more about the gears and gadgets and high flying hijinks and probably doesn’t care about a witty or intellectually stimulating script.
Best Scene:
I love Windlifter’s bizarre campfire story. Of course, part of me wonders if it’s a bit offensive in its glib mockery of “esoteric” Native American campfire stories, but I can’t complain too much because it was the only entertaining scene in the movie.
Watching, I thought, “If this were the 80s, the movie we’re watching right now would have a plot a lot like this story.” Low budget, B movie kids’ releases in my childhood were never animated nearly so well as this. They always looked very slapdash and cheap. But wow, the plots! They were dizzying and crazy! And as kids, we were pretty much expected to just jump in and go with it, taking the crazy world of the story at face value and acting like it all made sense.
Cash grab cartoons back then were more exciting. They always had overly involved plots like, “If the space ninjas can’t return the orb of power to the cat princess by moonrise, then there won’t be any Christmas!” And the dialogue was always rushed, as if they’d been translated from another language but nothing in the promotional materials disclosed this. Those movies were impossible to follow and cheaply animated, but they were never boring. That’s for sure.
Best Action Sequence:
I liked watching the final heroic rescue. The blaze of fire looked beautiful. It reminded me fondly of Bambi, and I thought, I wish this movie were Bambi. When I saw that movie as a kid, I did think parts of it were kind of boring, but it was never anywhere near as intolerably boring as this. And you get that wonderful moment of pain and catharsis. “We made it, Mother. Mother? Mother?” “Your mother can’t be with you anymore.”
(If you’re going to see this movie, I recommend thinking about other more entertaining movies as you watch in order to stay conscious.)
Later at the end of the rescue, there was a cool moment that reminded my daughter and me of the crazy hard level of Donkey Kong we had just been playing where you have to drive this little mine cart and make it jump.
Then Dusty Crophopper pushed his limits, and my daughter cried in delight, “See! I told you that he could crash. I always knew that he could get his picture on that wall. He’s great at crashing!”
The Negatives:
This movie is so boring. It’s just not interesting at all. Despite having a great moral, it’s not well written at all. It’s not even passably entertaining. You have to think about other stuff while you’re watching it to pass the time or else I’m pretty sure you’ll die.
I remember thinking, Clearly a point this wishes to make is that getting old doesn’t make a person less valuable. Then I thought of all the cool people who have lived long lives, and all the cool stuff they’ve done in old age. Then I remembered some great jokes from Golden Girls. Then I noticed that the lodge in the movie looks like the lobby of the Grand Californian Hotel, and I thought fondly of Disneyland. Then I mused, A lot of people thought Humphrey Bogart was too old for Lauren Bacall, but they had such a beautiful, sort of tragic love story. And then I thought about Lauren Bacall and Katharine Hepburn because they’re just awesome, and meanwhile, the movie kept going on and on and on.
My daughter claims that she loved every minute of this movie, but I’m pretty sure that is a big lie because she asked me about five times variations of the question, “How much longer does this movie last again? Is it almost going to be over yet?” The instant it ended, she leaped to her feet and started rushing out of the theater.
Also, though I occasionally was amused by Julie Bowen’s crazy stalker plane character, I was also annoyed by the lazy writing that seemed to suggest that any females you should happen across will probably be stalking you for no apparent reason. The animation all looks pretty good, but the writing is beyond lazy. When I think about it, that makes me a little sad.
Overall:
I will never watch this movie again by choice without some sort of extreme monetary incentive, but your kids might like it. This is a movie for children that offers quality animation, cool planes, nice scenery, pleasant music, and a legitimately solid, rather hard-hitting moral that (bizarrely) made me tear up and feel grateful to be alive. The closing song that played over the end credits was also pretty rousing and made me want to be a firefighter for almost three minutes until I forgot about it when I left the theater.
Basically if your kid likes Planes, then go ahead and see Planes 2. If you don’t have kids and you decide to see this movie, I’m going to assume that you’re completely insane. Don’t be too offended. I’m pretty crazy myself.