Control: IF Review…
I, Dalton Lewis, have a really big mental problem.
Actually, I’ve got lots.
First, I’ve got paranoid schizophrenia. I hear voices. They tell me things, untrue things. Fortunately, they have been talking to me for twenty years. I know to ignore them now.
That’s not the relevant mental problem.
Second, I’ve been struggling at strategy games recently. I was losing a lot of games at Warhammer 40k and Pokemon. People defeated me easily and didn’t think much of my skill at either game.
Then I won a Pokemon prerelease event with a few people — eight or so if I remember correctly. I also went 2–1 at a Warhammer 40k tournament, an excellent result for me.
That’s not the relevant mental problem, either.
Third, I have had trouble with watching anything new at home. I just watch old television shows over and over instead of watching anything new. I have a block preventing me from trying anything recent that I haven’t seen — like the wonderful Mike Flanagan shows or Fallout or Dead Boy Detectives or Wednesday. I can’t make myself watch more than a little bit of those every few days.
That’s not the relevant mental problem, either.
The relevant mental problem is this: I don’t like giving negative reviews. People have given me so many bad reviews that I have begun to hate people who give bad reviews to anything. It has become a cancer to society — this culture of saying how horrible so-and-so a movie is. People worked hard at these shows and tried to entertain an audience and make art. It’s not nice to say how horrible you think they did at that.
However…
IF isn’t a great movie. It’s a film about imaginary friends and a little girl who wants to help them. She is just losing her innocence and youth. It has nice qualities, and likable characters, and an okay premise. It’s just poorly done. It doesn’t really have much tension between the characters or any real arcs for anyone except for some very quick transformations.
In the movie a young lady named Bea is with her grandmother because her father is in the hospital with an undisclosed illness that doesn’t seem to hurt him or slow him down at all. He still can make nice with his daughter and see her and make jokes with her.
She then begins to see imaginary friends and Ryan Reynolds, who manages the imaginary friends. They try to help the imaginary friends to have a purpose in life.
This sounds very sappy. It is very sappy. This is a story without any kind of antagonist at all. No one is trying to stop the good guys from accomplishing anything. That’s fine. That could work.
Do you know what the problem is? The lines just don’t work. I don’t know why. The individual sequences don’t jive for me. I can’t figure out how to make them into a happy and fulfilling story.
There is a scared and silly purple monster IF. He is scared. He tries to find his human and get together with him even though he is an adult now. This is because the movie has given up on the idea to find him a new human to connect with — it abandoned that storyline. There is no bad guy stopping this. There is only a sappy series of scenes in which he tries to convince his human to believe in dreams again. If this sounds sappy and condescending, it really is — it really, really is.
There are fun sequences in which people sing and dance and play around happily but they don’t really have great conflict between the characters. They don’t have great tension or arcs. Bea tries to realize, I don’t know, to be a kid still? I don’t know. I suppose that’s the storyline there, but it’s not as clear as it could be.
I want to write novels, novels that could be turned into movies. I watch a lot of movies, and I don’t understand. Some of these movies have a problem with tension, arcs, and character interactions.
Ryan Reynolds doesn’t make a whole lot of jokes in the movie that I can remember — except for a couple that are in the trailer. He is a somber man who wants to take saving IF’s seriously.
I watched this and said too often that this scene doesn’t work. I don’t know why I said that: I just did.
It reminded me of me.
That’s the gist of it, right? It reminded me of some of the writing that I did that didn’t work, that I wrote when I was not writing at my best. That’s what bothered me — that this rich Hollywood actor/writer/director could write a bad movie that would get good audience ratings and make decent money and get made in today’s Hollywood — in spite of being awful.
My books get self-published because they, like IF, are usually not that great. I know that. I try my hardest to write books that are intelligent, books of significance. I know that, so far, I have failed in my attempt to do so. I have simply written to the best of my ability but haven’t succeeded in writing that home run yet.
I will continue to try. So should the writer/actor/director of this sub-par film — a famous and rich man who is beloved by millions. He has made it in Hollywood and in life and is a tremendous success who got this passion project made. It sounded great — a bunch of famous actors playing imaginary friends of kids having adventures — but didn’t work out.
What should have happened to make this good?
I don’t know.
Maybe they should have had stakes, a countdown or something. Maybe there should have been a clear disagreement — some clear central conflict between the characters. Maybe there should have been more clear problems for the characters to solve. It could be that the IF’s disappear forever if they don’t reconnect with someone within seven days. It could be that some sinister force — it doesn’t have to be a cackling bad guy — has made it impossible for them to connect with these people. Maybe someone should disagree with someone — ever — during the entire movie.
On the other hand that would make it more into a traditional Hollywood movie. I think the stakes should be raised by conflict about the girl trying to grow up and not wanting imaginary friends but continuing to want to dream and explore and be a dreamer. She should not want to lose her IF but slowly find it drifting away from her against her will and want to help the IF’s who are finding this. That isn’t clear in the story and should be.
I guess there are two directions: one, a ticking clock and a villain who is scared and desperate and has to be reasoned with; and two, a series of situations in which people are losing their childlike innocence and trying to figure out how to hold onto it. Either one of these avenues would have worked — but the story tries neither and accomplishes neither.
Overall a wonderful effort made by wonderful people caring about their craft — that’s my grade. Great effort, wonderful attempt, but a failure. Sorry, rich Hollywood. This one missed the mark.
Thanks, and take care, friends.
