Technically this movie is flawless. Fine acting, extremely good pacing, does a great job of setting up the emotions.
It has everything in place to be a movie like Flipped, or even My Girl.
EXCEPT there is a fatal flaw in the basic conception of the movie!
We want the kid to be special. OK, many options there. Magic could be involved. Or aliens. Being an exceptionally gifted kid. Or simply a nod to something never really explained, like Hearts in Atlantis.
But of all these options, the writers make the lamest of all choices - army-directed technobabble! So instead of suspending disbelief, our noses are rubbed in just how ridiculous (and cliched, OMG how damn cliched) the plot is. The movie should have been about family, acceptance, friendship, just how strange and magical childhood is. And it was all those things, right up to the idiotic reveal. At which point it became a subpar boring rant about the Military-Industrial Complex, ho hum, and the magic never returned - I mean, how could it?
Would Mermaids have been a great film if we'd learn halfway through that Wynona Ryder was secretly a genetic experiment by the CIA and that's why she kept having paranoid religious fantasies? The very idea reveals the stupidity of the suggestion!
Can you make a great Military-Industrial Complex movie with kids? Sure, that's The Terminator. But The Terminator doesn't spend 50 minutes pretending to be movie about childhood and friendship before bizarrely changing direction...
It has everything in place to be a movie like Flipped, or even My Girl.
EXCEPT there is a fatal flaw in the basic conception of the movie!
We want the kid to be special. OK, many options there. Magic could be involved. Or aliens. Being an exceptionally gifted kid. Or simply a nod to something never really explained, like Hearts in Atlantis.
But of all these options, the writers make the lamest of all choices - army-directed technobabble! So instead of suspending disbelief, our noses are rubbed in just how ridiculous (and cliched, OMG how damn cliched) the plot is. The movie should have been about family, acceptance, friendship, just how strange and magical childhood is. And it was all those things, right up to the idiotic reveal. At which point it became a subpar boring rant about the Military-Industrial Complex, ho hum, and the magic never returned - I mean, how could it?
Would Mermaids have been a great film if we'd learn halfway through that Wynona Ryder was secretly a genetic experiment by the CIA and that's why she kept having paranoid religious fantasies? The very idea reveals the stupidity of the suggestion!
Can you make a great Military-Industrial Complex movie with kids? Sure, that's The Terminator. But The Terminator doesn't spend 50 minutes pretending to be movie about childhood and friendship before bizarrely changing direction...