July 28, 2011

Lizard Actor Man Acts.

Rango is a really strange film. It’s one of them that I watched with Brer, and while it was certainly entertaining, I really had to question a lot of the general world concept.

I mean, okay, this is a world with humans, who live like humans do, but it’s also a world where animals can build a tiny human-like town and live like townspeople? It’s not animals with human characteristics, these are basically humans, only they’re animals of various sorts. They’re living an old west life in the modern day as well, for some reason. There are little bits of scavenged human technology, like the big water cooler bottle in the bank, but they’re also clearly making their own glass bottles and jugs. These animals are in a complete society, not a scavenged from humanity one. I guess I think too much about that stuff, but it really kind of bothered me. The setting was so weird.

The core of the story, though, was fairly interesting. You’ve got Rango, who is a lizard who, due to insanity from living in an aquarium alone for so long, has decided he is an actor. When he ends up stranded and in the town of Dirt, he puts on a role as one of the most badass cowboys who ever lived, because acting is what he does. Of course, he isn’t. Hilarity ensues! What fun! Ha ha! But yeah, actors called upon to actually be what they’re used to acting is a tried and true storytelling device, and it works well here, even if it really paints Rango as just a completely, completely insane individual. You just get the feeling that, even when he’s inspiring people and doing good, he really has no idea what he’s saying at all. He just keeps rolling with it, because that’s what he does. When he goes back to save the town in the end, thanks to a completely ridiculous plot contrivance of summoning a bunch of mobile plants to help him for some reason, he doesn’t seem like he suddenly has it together any more than he does before. At the end of the film, people still love him for his lies, and you get no indication that that is going to change. He’s still going to be the terrible law enforcement officer than he was earlier in the film. It’s just such a strange place to leave things, I guess.

The other thing that kind of stood out to me during the film was the number of “jokes for the adults” that I saw. I mean, I get that Shrek made that a thing that people do. But it’s still kind of sad that people can’t make a movie that’s interesting enough for kids AND adults, and instead have to attempt to throw in jokes that are over the children’s heads, but entertain the adults forced to watch the movie. Granted, there’s nothing wrong with Hunter S. Thompson and Clint Eastwood references, but they were just so in-your-face. Just seemed to be screaming “HERE IS A JOKE FOR YOOOOOU!” I dunno. Lame.

Overall, though, it really wasn’t that bad. I guess I mostly did complaining, but a lot of that was hindsight. While watching it, I was entertained. I have certainly seen much worse animated movies. Still, it didn’t really blow me over like people were saying it should have. I was much more surprised and entertained by, say, How To Train Your Dragon than Rango. Oh well.

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