Coastal View News
If you want a recipe for a great children’s movie, just take
a race of miniscule people who live in the forest, add a zany scientist with
contraptions galore, combine it with a lonely teenage girl in need of a little
adventure, and top it off with a three-legged dog and two talking mollusks.
Sounds like fun, right? The problem is, sometimes even the best recipes don’t
come out right.
There are two storylines here. First there is Mary Katherine
or “MK” (Amanda Seyfried), whose mom apparently just died, and who shows up at
her estranged dad’s house out in the middle of nowhere in hopes of reconnecting.
Unfortunately, her dad hardly notices. He is too caught up trying to find a
civilization of tiny people who he thinks live in the forest. He has cameras
and microphones everywhere, a special headset built for observing little
things, and a whole bunch of other weird-looking stuff. It’s all very crazy.
Except that—and here is the second storyline—those tiny
people actually exist. There really is a miniature civilization living in the
front yard. There are good guys (the Leafmen) and bad guys (Boggans) who ride
around on birds, queens and generals who fight for control of the ecosystem,
flowers that talk, and plenty more. There are even two annoying snails that just
don’t know when to shut up.
These two storylines are pretty much unrelated until MK runs
into the forest and somehow gets shrunk down to itty-bitty size. Suddenly she
is right into the middle of the struggle between the Leafmen and the Boggans.
It turns out a major war is going on, and the fate of the forest hangs in the
balance.
MK does not exactly feel comfortable playing a role in this
mess, but she has no choice. She hesitatingly joins up with two of the more
important Leafmen: Ronin (Colin Farell) and his adopted teenage son, Nod (Josh
Hutcherson). Together they try to thwart the Boggans and save the forest.
Meanwhile, MK’s dad has no idea that his daughter has been
miniaturized. Now, if he would just keep doing what he was doing when he alienated
his daughter, he would maybe be able to find her and help her out. Alas, he
stops looking, because he feels bad about ignoring MK. How ironic. So MK has to
either go it alone, or else find a way to grab her dad’s attention.
This is an odd part of the story. We have a deadbeat dad who
is too obsessed with work to pay any attention to his daughter. And we have one
very frustrated daughter. Given that this is a children’s movie, where the
moral of the story matters a lot, one would expect the dad to reform. One would
expect him to realize that his family is more important than his work and that
he needs to cool it with the Leafman stuff. But he doesn’t change one bit. It
is MK who has to change in order to make the relationship work. She has to
accommodate her inattentive father. She has to devote herself to what interests
him. Which seems kind of messed up.
This speaks to some broader issues with “Epic”. It seems to
be set up all right. The setting seems fun, the characters seem interesting,
and the plot seems promising. But it just fails to come together. There is
something missing.
A good children’s movie has a compelling moral. It highlights
what is beautiful and nice and innocent and refreshing about youth. It has
lovely characters. But a really great children’s movie fits together in a certain
special way. It emerges from its various plot devices, action sequences,
twists, turns, smiles, tears, and jokes; it emerges as its own thing that somehow
just gets it right.
“Epic” falls a little short. And that makes all the
difference.
