The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
Please vote in the Forum Structure Poll. Polling will close at 2PM EST on January 21, 2025.
[The Incredibles 2] is out now! OPEN SPOILERS
So It Goes
We keep moving...Registered User regular
We keep moving...Registered User regular
Hey talk about the Incredibles sequel, Incredibles 2, in this thread.
Open spoilers.
Also you can argue to your heart's delight about Incredibles 1 in here too.
Open spoilers.
Also you can argue to your heart's delight about Incredibles 1 in here too.
+8
Posts
The first film is still full of great character animation and the visual design is top-notch, but the tech behind it is starting to show its age. The textures in the sequel are so much more nuanced and detailed, and the lighting is both more dynamic and bold while also allowing for more subtlety.
I'll have more to say about the actual themes in the sequel later.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
The only part I really didn’t care for was the intro where people told me that sequels take time and effort! Of course it was going to take 14 years!
Except Cars got 2 sequels (possibly more if you consider spinoffs) and that movie came out after the first Incredibles.
Of course I never really cared for the Cars movies so the fact that they’ve gotten so much more love from Pixar probably just makes me salty. Also I heard the sequels were shit, so I guess I can’t complain about the wait too much since this one was so great.
Maybe it’s just me but Craig T Nelson sounded super old in this. Maybe because of the stuff happening to Mr. Incredible but also just in general.
Hopefully the next one doesn’t take 14 years.
Yeah, I caught Incredibles 1 on TV a little while back and I was amazed at how plastic everything looked.
Still a good movie, but I guess there's no CGI that's not going to start showing it's age, given enough age.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Some examples:
Skyfall:
Black Panther:
In The Incredibles, Syndrome may be a horrible, violent person; but his viewpoint is meant to embody an existing force in society, ie, the desire of lesser people to tear down and destroy the specialness of superheroes. At the end of The Incredibles, the family concludes that they will compromise with this viewpoint—they don’t become open heroes, but they will use their powers a little more, as Dash does in his race. They will be a little more special without being so outlandish as to shame the non-powered people. In this way, as in many films to use this thematic antagonism technique, Syndrome’s philosophy is absorbed in modified fashion into the heroes’.
Because it’s not “it’s bad to give everyone super powers” that is emphasized.
It’s that “no one will be super”. They pause for effect to make it super extra clear that this is the super evil goal.
Yes! Precisely. The villain is trying to take down Ayn Rand and so the movie is telling us he is wrong and that Ayn Rand is right.
@Archangle
It feels like the Ratatouille might've tuned its message a little bit in response to some of the Incredibles criticism. The Incredibles mocks the idea that "everyone is special" - while Ratatouille earnestly puts forward an egalitarian catchphrase "anyone can cook". (Though one character later clarifies that this doesn't mean that "everyone can become a great artist" but rather that "a great artist can come from anywhere", even very "humble origins".)
The message of the Incredibles says “super people exist and it’s an inborn trait”. Which is not great but it’s not exactly bad. But what it it tells you to do is, “If you’re super; be super. If you’re not; don’t get in the way of super people.” With the added kicker that being super is something you’re born with. The villain is evil for wanting to be super and wanting everyone to be as good as supers. The Heros succeed by virtue of inborn traits.
Ratatouille also tells you “super people exist and it’s an inborn trait”*. But what it tells you to do is “don’t prejudge someone’s abilities based on where they come from or what they look like.” The audience (the critic character) is transformed by the truth of the skill revising their long held belief about skill. The villain wants to abuse the lower station of those with skills when they have them. The hero succeeds because he doesn’t allow prejudice to get in the way of a person and admits his mistakes with regards to claiming credit for the others work.
If the incredibles were about the relationship between the supers and Edna Mode then things might be different. But there is no one trying to use her awesome design and engineering skills for themselves. And the plot isn’t about how giving Edna her due was the key to being a good person. It’s about how the key to being a good person is being born that way. And the key for everyone else is to get out of their way.
The villain is evil because he murders a bunch of people and unleashes a giant killer robot on a city and treats the lives of others as unimportant. If his plan was just to market cool inventions that did things like help people fly he wouldn't be evil and the Incredibles wouldn't be fighting him.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
All of that is in service of his goal to be special, to be the most special and to then rob the other special people of what makes them special.
Sure, but if he went about that goal by just making his tech and selling it openly he wouldn't be evil. He'd have the same goal, which would be kinda petty because omg get over yourself, but he wouldn't be evil. The methods by which he goes about his plan are evil, and his cavalier attitude to the lives of others is why the Incredibles are fighting him.
I don't think the pile of bodies can be dismissed as being incidental to his moral position.
I'm certainly aware of the objectivist reading of the movie, and how Syndrome's plan to make superheroes not special is to deny the uberman his rightful place above us all and so forth. I don't necessarily agree with that reading, but I don't think it's controversial to suggest that Syndrome's moral standing does not derive solely from his plan. He killed a bunch of people!
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
He also knowingly blew up a plane with children on board, so him being evil isn’t specific to his goal of being special.
But the movie jams the point home that he is a sociopath. He tries to murder children, kills a bunch of supers, unleashes a killer robot on an unwitting city, and attempts to kidnap Jack Jack. The motivation behind his ultimate plan to sell his inventions is just another instance of him being petty to supers in general and Mr. Incredible in particular. He knows that Bob is proud of being a super and standing out, and “when I’m old and I’ve had my fun” only then would he sell his inventions. The point in that moment isn’t some great equalization of mankind, it’s that he wants to utterly break Mr. Incredible because Mr. Incredible broke the pedestal he had put him on.
To put this another, far less lengthy way: if this is all some kind of metaphor for objectivism vs. collectivism, they did a disservice to the metaphor by making the collectivist a mass-murdering, child-stealing whackjob with a chip on his shoulder for one objectivist in particular instead of objectivism in general. Not that I think fixing the metaphor would have led to a better movie or even an ethically consistent philosophy.
tl;dr: It’s a popcorn animated superhero family flick, and the philosophy crap is third banana to the personal growth of the family and sweet animated action scenes.
Why wouldn't it be evil? The film certainly tells us it's evil. It's part of his evil plan. It's presented as being the culmination of his evil monologue. This is the moral framework the film presents us with.
His lack of any caring for the number of people his plan kills is the immediate threat they are fighting but he literally monologues the entirety of his evil plan at us and the whole point of that framework is to tell us, the audience, what the evil things he's doing are and why he's doing them. The bodies are not incidental but they aren't the whole of his evil plans either.
You can say the people he kills are also evil, and that's true and no one is arguing otherwise, but you can't ignore that it's not all of what makes him evil. Because the film directly tells us otherwise.
Screenslaver is an amazing supervillain name, right folks?
This was a good movie. Little more sprawling than 1, but I think it earned that after the 14 year wait.
And the Incredibles never go, “We have to stop him before he makes everybody super!” They were trying to stop him from killing a shit ton of people. Preventing him from selling his inventions is never presented as a motivating factor for the supposedly objectivist family.
"...only mights and maybes."
Mr. Incredible’s big flaw is pride, and neither movie really goes into addressing it enough. It’s the reason Syndrome was able to play him like a fiddle. He treated him like he was at the height of his glory days and Bob ate it up, so much so that he outright lied to his wife about where he was. Hopefully the third one pushes it to the forefront because it’s the one thing that keeps Bob a bit unsympathetic sometimes.
By contrast, I noticed how the second film made sure the fights had no casualties, as opposed to the pile of mooks who are no-excuses-they-are-dead in the first film.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Yeah but they didn't stop the money from being stolen in the first place. In fact the whole point of the first act of this movie was that supers don't always make things a whole lot better. Those authorities actually had a good point. The money was still stolen, Underminer got away, the city was still majorly fucked up. At best the Incredibles were marginally successful helping keep destruction from being as bad as it could have been, and they saved a life or two in the process -- but as Bob Odenkirk's character points out, nobody knew about those lives because all they saw was destruction and then the shameful arrests post-destruction.
So from the authorities' point of view, why encourage heroes by covering the damage they cause? It's not until video proof surfaces that the heroes are actually being... y'know, heroic... that the public starts coming back around to heroes again.
Honestly they could make a dozen more of these. I love the Incredibles universe.
Give me a Frozone spinoff. Never ever show Honey's face.
Oh, I totally get it. It’s just funny to me civil lawsuits was the breaking point that got supers banned in the first place, but the government makes sure supervillains can continue their craziness unimpeded without us getting a peep of any official anti-villain efforts.
True. I guess I just want more story cause they’ve built a compelling world with interesting implications with just 2 films. Like, yah, don’t over explain, but I would like to know why Underminer’s a seemly mundane occurrence but Syndrome or Screenslaver don’t have FBI task forces trying to hunt them down (because then the heroes don’t have a story I know, but the mention would be nice)
Mostly, I just want an excuse for an Incredibles comic series where we get more top notch hero and villain names.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
The objectivist argument I think focuses too much on some lines of dialogue and misses the heart of the movie. Bob genuinely wants to help people. If his job was actually trying to resolve insurance cases in the best way possible instead of being a cog in a machine designed to deny all claims he probably wouldn't hate it. It's not about being famous or rich, he just wants to feel fulfilled and he associates that with being a superhero because that was his glory days.
Really the forced conceit part is that instead of cracking down on vigilantism and making people like Bob government employees as police or fire fighters they doubled down on the secrecy and forbid them using their powers.
They apparently have a model for her, they just haven’t used it yet.
And yah, it’s kind of interesting how I can care more about the Incredibles world and how it works than I do about Marvel’s stuff, despite them having more movies. Just the difference of show vs. tell I guess.
That is probably a far deeper cut than a Pixar film needs or wants to go into, though.
I'm "kupiyupaekio" on Discord.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
the raccoon was clearly the hero of the universe
14 years later it felt kind of uncomfortable to revisit the “off-screen hectoring wife” trope. Both Incredibles movies are way too in love with ‘50s era sitcom gender dynamics, without doing enough to subvert/deconstruct them. I’m not sure retrofuturism really should be enjoyed unthinkingly, since it’s a vision of a technologically utopian, culturally backward future—paradise for the straight white male.
Equally frustrating is how both films are about bigotry and oppression of an all-American white family but essentially totally sidestep the blatant metaphor for racism, homophobia, etc. The most progressive statement in either film is that career women like Edna can choose not to have children (but they love kids anyway). Take away Frozone, and between the throwback perspective and the Randian overtones these would be Bertram Cooper’s favorite movies.
Quick edit: I like Incredibles a lot but I think there’s a lot of cultural issues that be read into it really easily and are worth interrogating. There’s a lot about Incredibles 2 that could push the homosexuality metaphor, but instead I’m just reminded that it’s 2018 and Disney still refuses to acknowledge gays exist.