My favorite movie reviewer, Steven Greydanus, gives The Incredibles high marks. I agree.
Melanie and I went to see it last week, and it was great. It was very funny, had lots of action, had a good message, and the soundtrack was great, a jazzy thing inspired by Henry Mancini and John Berry with splashes of James Bond theme thrown about liberally.
It all takes place in an amorphous pseudo-Fifties, pseudo-present world, and as Greydanus says its “a romantic celebration of marriage and family as an act of heroism while it also acknowledges the sacrifices that parents make by giving up the pursuit of their own self-fulfillment for the sake of the domestic good.” It also balks at the idea of enforced mediocrity for the sake of self-esteem and takes on several other liberal shibboleths for good measure, as well.
Read the review, go to the movie, and make sure you take the whole family. It’s fun, fun, fun.
A couple of notes: Until I saw the credits, I would have sworn that Jack Black played the villain. And Edna Mode, who nearly stole the show, wasn’t one of the famed character actresses I imagined, but was director Brad Bird himself. Hilarious. I also wish we could have had more of Samuel L. Jackson’s character “Frozone”; he was ... dare I say it? ... cool.
SPOILERS AHEAD! I took my nephew to see the movie on Saturday, for his eleventh birthday. My parents went with us. My mother turned to me at one point and said, “That’s supposed to be Edith Head, isn’t it?” And I said, “Yeah! I would never have thought of that myself.” Edna Mode = Edith Head? Also, shades of Star Wars Episode VI when Dash is dashing through the woods chased by the bad guys. No?
I thought it was OK, but not great. It is not the movie of the year some reviewers are saying it is. It was too violent for children, even though it is obviously marketed to children (as well as to adults). Regarding the soundtrack, it was so loud that my hard-of-hearing father appreciated being able to hear so well.
Maybe one is not allowed to give the USCCB credit on this website, but one thing they have going for them is their movie reviewers. I think their review of this movie was spot on.
http://www.usccb.org/movies/i/theincredibles.htm
The USCCB reviews are not prudish, yet keep family and Catholic values in mind in their reviews. It’s an invaluable service for checking the content of movies that my pre-teen children want to see with their friends. For example, no one else is going to tell you that there is an attempted suicide in a movie, as there was in The Incredibles.