It's been impossible not to notice the heavy advertisements and promotional tie-ins that Disney has been doing for The Incredibles. Nonetheless, while I liked the movie, I totally didn't think it was for children below the age of, say, 12.
Big fat invective and spoilers follow.
Here are some plot elements in The Incredibles that made me think "why don't I just have the kids watch Alien3":
- Attempted suicide [suicide]
- Trips away from the office [lies]
- Marital problems/tension [potential for divorce]
- Sexual innuendo [sex]
- Allusion to adultery (not actual) [sex, infidelity]
- Edna vets the new suits (to include the ones for the children, including Jack-Jack) with missiles and machine gun fire [death, killing children]
- Hiding behind the corpse of one of your former best friends [death]
- Lethal torso shot with the rock [death]
- Launching someone to certain doom from tram car into water far, far away [death]
- Lethal tram car being chucked into two guards at a checkpoint (think of Newton's Second Law and what would happen to a normal person if a 600-800 pound lump of metal hit you head on going about 70mph.) [Yes, you guessed it, death.]
- "There are children aboard this plane" [near-death]
- The rundown of assassinated Supers [murder]
- The refinement of Omnidroids killing the Supers [murder]
- Discussions of how Supers with capes got killed [murder]
- "They won't show the same kind of restraint because you're children." [murder]
- Gambling with Mirage's life [attempted murder, justifiable homicide]
- razor saucer flies into cliff, explosion, dead guy [death, attempted killing of children]
- razor saucer flies into each other, explosion, dead guys [death, attempted killing of children]
- razor saucer flies into ground, explosion, dead guy [death, attempted killing of children]
- "You married Elastigirl...and got busy?" (okay, real appropriate for, well, CHILDREN, huh, what the fuck?") [sex]
- tank crews bruleé à la deus ex machina by laser blasts from Omnidroid. Probably some collateral death to infantry nearby [death]
- Jack-Jack the Satanic Human Torch [yeah, baby]
- Cape. Jet Turbine. FOD. Cuisinart. [puree!]
And Disney is selling this as a children's movie? Did parents all over the United Imperial States of America check their fucking intellects at the pocket book? Oh wait, it's the Imperial States of Orthodoxy. Pass me some shitty American beer.
First time I saw The Incredibles was on a Disney cruise ship. At the end, the parents and children are clapping at the end of the movie. What the fuck??? I would be perfectly happy to keep this movie locked up until the kids are, oh, about 12.
And here's the reason why:
- It's one thing to trivialize the kind of normally lethal falls that occur in the Warner Brothers universe, along with the undisputed excellence of Acme products. Just ask Wile E. Coyote.
- It's another thing to give death (and let's call it what it is, it's death) more than lip service but sell the movie to children? I cringe when I think of toddlers watching The Incredibles.
That's why I'm really inflexible about kids (mine or anyone else's, for that matter) playing with "guns" or "knives" in the yard. That's about as verboten as the kids watching Barney or Jerry Springer. In real life, death hurts. It hurts a lot when you have to witness it, and a lot of the time, it probably fucking hurts like hell for the one who has to prematurely undergo it.
Dead is dead. Children can have their childhood, but as I say sometimes at work, it's under a nonpermissive METT-TC (Mission, Enemy, Troops, Terrain, Time, Civilians = battlefield environment). Dead people don't get up. I'm sure there are some folks in Phnom Penh, Srebrenica, Kigali, or hell, even Fallujah who would probably agree with that statement.
On the bright side, the suborbital sequences of the rocket pushing over max ordinate in space are pretty damn cool.
As I reiterate: it's not a fucking children's movie.
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