Incredibles 2 is an incredibly loaded film. But, most of you probably wouldn’t know. The general train of thought coming out of the film has been nostalgia mixed with Jack Jack adoration. Those people are dumb. Brad Bird again brings his complicated adoration of Objectivist philosophy into the best take on Silver Age Marvel action. While this is enough for people that dig sweet superhero family action, it’s going to leave others expecting more. Yes, that is possible for a movie where a character is named Evelyn Deavor (Evil Endeavor).
Picking up on Iger’s aesthetic boner, the film opens immediately after where The Incredibles ended. Some have argued there is an extended timeline between the Syndrome takedown and the Underminer attack. To the average person in the audience, it’s near instantaneous. But, that’s doesn’t matter. What matters is that we’re thrown back into a world similar to the first movie. Supers exist, but they can’t engage in their real lives. A brother-sister rich weirdo duo makes an effort to employ Elasti-Girl, but leaves Mr. Incredible at home with the kids.
What’s really going on?
What follows is probably the greatest play on what the MCU and DCEU has had to offer over the last decade. It’s kinda hard to believe that the first Incredibles movie predates both universes by a decade, but that’s where we are. Hell, The Incredibles came out 2 years before Superman Returns. In a way, this is Brad Bird commenting on a mini-movement that he helped birth by re-imagining 60s heroics.
The thing that bugged me and delayed my coverage for a few days was revisiting the movie for a second viewing. That second viewing confirmed that Evelyn Deavor’s hero pick-ups were in the vein of Wonder Woman and Black Panther. Predominantly African American and female heroes hired to usher in a world driven by a female perspective. These new hires including the delightful Voyd will exist as a new face to heroics that will replace the Mr. Incredible and Gazerbeam of old. Hell, Evelyn even makes room for an elderly superhero as a twisted bit of nostalgia.
It’s amazing how much commentary is stuffed into every frame by Brad Bird. From there, it’s a race to stop the Screenslayer and his secret benefactors. While I’m not going to spoil anything, I want to draw attention to what Brad Bird did. The first movie was plagued by the barely conscious Woke people commenting on how that text worked as an endorsement of Ayn Rand’s beliefs. This sequel is a little more on the nose with its read. Incredibles 2 is the biggest rebuttal of the modern superhero movement and audiences gave it the biggest opening weekend for an animated film.
INCREDIBLES 2: An Assessment of Nu-Disney
The Nu-Disney style is easy to mock. Hell, there has been a cottage industry that has arrived from calling things Soylo and moping about how the director of Looper failed to make another satisfying Sci-Fi fantasy film. Brad Bird is a writer/director with something to say, even if the intentions aren’t that directly removed from the Soy crowd. When Helen Parr saves the day, she finds out that Elasti-Girl was recruited because she was easier to hypnotize. The base line given to everyone was that she caused less property damage than Bob, so that’s why she got chosen for the Deavor project.
But, she also represents the kind of change in faces seen across what the Deavors were doing. It was a representative clan of women and minorities that were easily misled by a wealthy woman to undermine her father’s fantasy of supers and humans working together. All Evelyn had to do was make these people feel they had purpose working for a company with an obscene amount of money.
No matter what they did, they would be correct. Hell, the Deavor company (DevTech) would even construct a fake villain for the world to toss its scorn at when the heat got to be too much. This film is so meta that I’m stunned I haven’t seen 1000 YouTube videos either hating or loving this movie by now.
The Incredibles said what?
For those saying that this movie is feminist, get your head straight. This movie is as feminist as Wal-Mart is pro-employee. It’s a marketing line offered to make people feel better about mindlessly going with the flow. Hell, the overall message of the film is about as crushing as Back to the Future. Don’t challenge the flow, don’t accept change and always retreat to the family unit. Think about how the film ends.
Elasti-Girl can ‘out’ what’s going on, but she needs two men and her kids to defeat the Deavors. Anyone that buys into the diverse stance of DevTech was hypnotized and misled to attack anything that might help them. The last bit of the film is the family forcing their way into their daughter Violet’s first date to remove her ability to make decisions. This is a film that modern Disney put out, people. I feel like I’m going crazy here.
This is why I tend to back out of deep reads, as I can rant even when edited. But, it’s not hard to see what Brad Bird sneakily did with this film. For a director that helped set the framework to come, he used Incredibles 2 to address how a decade of gains has been used and abused. While I don’t agree with Bird’s views, this is the work of an auteur. An auteur who is probably soon to be raked over the coals by certain online factions again and again and again.
