An Incredible Review for Disney’s Incredibles 2

It has been a bit since I’ve had time to go to the movies lately, but at the moment, there were just too many tempting choices to not carve out some time for myself to go to the theater. What to see on a Saturday night though? The First Purge? Too political. Ant Man and Wasp? Too crowded. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom? I’ll pass. I was looking for a bit of escape, and Incredibles 2 ended up not being the correct choice for that.

It was a strange experience for me. The movie has been out for a couple of weeks already, and so had plenty of open seats, especially at a 10:30PM showing. Probably a dozen seats or so were filled, with only a couple of children.

This sequel to the movie 14 years ago picked up on literally the day that the previous movie ended on, and the beginning of this movie strips away the progress that the family seemed to make at the end of The Incredibles, bringing us back to the harsh reality that performing heroic acts was still illegal, and that the family was acting outside of the law.

This movie was dark, and real, creating a surreal experience, where characters are coded for so many different representations within the United States at the moment. Mr. Incredible is coded for the manufacturing worker that has lost his work, the stay-at-home fathers who are now raising their children, while Elastigirl is coded to be the entrepreneurial mother, who gets the opportunity to raise the status of the family, and becoming the breadwinner for the family. The arguments between them, the sexism of Mr. Incredible from a previous era, the cynical use of Elastigirl as representative of using women to sell ideas.

This movie that I had chosen had smacked me in the face with layers upon layers of interpretations, and I just find myself thinking about Screenslaver and how we consume media. The emphasis of critical thinking, the views of those with wealth, and influence, and where power really lies in society. It’s maddening to continue listing them, and to explain them might take a whole book, and that would just be for a set of relationship dynamics and ideas, and would only be a small portion of what this movie has to offer to analyze.

This will definitely be a movie that I will need to watch again to get more out of, and look forward to doing so, probably at least a dozen more times in the next few years.