Wonder Park (2019)

It would seem that the moment I joined AMC’s A-List, AMC started requiring that I pick a seat beforehand.  I don’t know if this is coincidence or not.  It does seem to be new, as people are still getting used to it.  However, it does have its advantages.  I can pick a seat with lots of leg room.  I can also see how full a movie is before getting seats.  This is especially useful for an animated movie like Wonder Park, where there might be lots of children.  I was fortunate to have only two other people, both adults, watching the movie with me.  Children tend to be, shall we say, unpredictable audience members.

The movie is about a girl named June who plans an imaginary park with her mother, called Wonderland.  (This leads to the conundrum of why a movie about Wonderland would be called Wonder Park.  There doesn’t seem to be a definitive answer for this.)  The plans are derailed when June’s mother, simply called Mom, has to go away.  (It’s not explicitly stated, but parents will pick up on the fact that the reason is most likely cancer.)

This leave’s Dad to take care of June.  He does his best, but June is affected by Mom's departure.  She puts away anything related to Wonderland, instead becoming overly protective of her father.  It becomes so bad that Dad has to send June to math camp to get her mind off of things.  She initially agrees, but escapes the bus ride and tries to run back  She’s diverted when she finds a piece of her Wonderland map and is led to the actual Wonderland, or what’s left of it.

There, she meets all of the characters that she and her mother created.  Many of the rides are there, but the park is being dismantled by chimpanzombies (stuffed toys that came to life) and fed into a great void called The Darkness.  Absent, at first, is Peanut, a chimpanzee who builds the park.  June manages to find him, believing that if he can fix the rides, all will be restored.

I think this may be a movie that was intended for both children and adults that somehow missed the mark.  There’s a certain amount of allegory that will go over the heads of children.  To be honest, I started reading about the movie after I saw it.  I came to realize that I had missed a bit, myself.  For instance, the chimpanzombies could be seen as an allusion to cancer.  They’re in the likeness of Peanut and attack the park, much like a cancer would attack a person.  (They’re also difficult to get rid of.)

I’m not sure this is a bad thing.  Someone who wanted to sit back and just watch the movie could easily do so.  On that level, it works as a girl who goes off on an adventure and finds the peace of mind that she needs.  On the other hand, someone who wanted to find deeper meaning could find a few connections.

The trouble is that it’s not a really great story.  It sort of reminds me of The Explorers.  The Explorers was rushed to production and had an incomplete feel to it.  Wonder Park seems like something that wasn’t quite fully developed, either.  It’s an entertaining 85 minutes, but it’s not the best I’ve seen.

According to Wikipedia, Nickelodeon is using this to launch a TV show, which I suppose makes sense.  I could see this being a pilot episode, setting up the characters and mythology.  Still, given the 85 minute runtime, I feel like the movie could have done better.  Then again, this may explain why I don’t watch any of Nickelodeon’s TV shows.

IMDb page

WarGames (1983)

Note:  This review was originally posted to my Epinions account.

WARNING:   I'm going to give away details about the movie, including the ending.

I’m a big fan of Beloit’s mindset list.  In it, the college has things that professors should keep in mind as to incoming students.  It seems like back in the 1980s, things were pretty basic.  Computers were text only.  Being able to draw a line was pretty neat.  I’m at an age now where incoming freshmen were born after I graduated from high school.  This means that incoming freshmen have never know a world with the USSR or a without a unified Germany.  A movie like WarGames would probably warrant visiting Wikipedia to find out what all of these things were.  (Back in my day, you had to go to the library.)

The movie is about a kid named David.  He has a computer and a phone line.  (I’m assuming it’s a dedicated line.  Those of us old enough to remember dial-up remember people yelling, “I’m on the phone!”)  He wants to find out about the latest video games that a company is releasing, so he finds out which telephone prefixes are near the company’s headquarters and sets his computer to dialing.  He eventually gets a few good candidates.  One computer, which goes by Joshua, has a list of games…including Thermonuclear War.  Sounds interesting.  The problem is that he needs a password, which he eventually deduces.

He sets out playing Thermonuclear War as the Soviet Union, targeting cities like Las Vegas.  Joshua plays as the United States.  NORAD -- the actual North American Aerospace Defense Command at Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station in Colorado, goes on alert when their new computerized system starts saying that the Soviets have launched their missiles.  You know it’s a simulation.  I know it’s a simulation.  David and the computer know it’s a simulation.  When David shows up at NORAD, he realizes that it might not be a simulation, after all.  The computer is putting up what appears to be actual real-time battle information.  Sure, the Soviet Union denies everything and there’s no actual visual confirmation of anything, but better safe than sorry.  DEFCON goes from 5 to 4, indicating that they’re a little worried.

Eventually, NORAD figures it out and brings David in for questioning.  Being the young genius he is, he escapes and finds the program’s creator, Stephen Falken.  Publicly, Falken is dead, but Joshua seems to think otherwise, even giving David an address where Falken receives checks.  It looks like Falken is the only one Joshua will respond to.  They get Falken to Joshua in time to have Falken stop everything, but a new problem arises: Joshua wants the actual launch code to the US missiles so that Joshua can launch the actual missiles.  Unfortunately, Joshua won’t listen to reason.  It takes a whole lot of tic tac toe to convince Joshua that war is futile.  When Joshua realizes that there can be no winner in war, he relents.

There is a very dated feel to the movie, and we’re not talking about just the computers.  As I mentioned, the map is a little different now than when I was in high school.  Those in high school now will probably need a history lesson to understand the dynamics.  The term “mutually assured destruction” comes up.  This was the understanding that both sides had the power to wipe the other side out, which is what leads to the inevitability of both sides losing.  Yes, America still has enemies, but this doesn’t really come up so much.  We’re not necessarily staring down an actual missile any more.

We also take computers for granted now.  Joshua was supposed to eliminate human error and delay when launching the missiles.  Joshua would follow the order to launch.  This was a much bigger deal back in the 80s when it was still possible to find a house without a desktop, three laptops, a tablet and a dozen or so cell phones in it.  On that note, I doubt it would have been that easy to hack into a military computer that easily.  For that matter, why bring David all the way to NORAD?  Wouldn’t it have been easier to question him where he was?

There is still a suspenseful feel to the movie.  No one knows whether or not to take the threat seriously.  If it were anything else, you could dismiss it, but no one wants to be the one to pass off an actual missile as fake.  Plus, just when you thought it was all over, Joshua makes other plans.  I’m curious to know how younger viewers will look at this movie, though.  I’m sure parents and grandparents will have a different take on it. 

IMDb page

Project X (1987)

Note:  This review was originally posted to my Epinions account.

WARNING:  I’m going to give away major details about the movie.  If you haven’t seen the movie and don’t want to find out the big plot twist, this isn’t the review for you.

Project X is one of those movies I saw a long time ago.  The movie was released in 1987, when I was only 11 years old.  I remembered that it was about chimpanzees being used as test pilots and the moral objections that come with that, but that was about it.  I finally got around to renting it from NetFlix.

The movie opens with Teri training a chimpanzee named Virgil to sign.  When her project loses funding, Teri is told that Virgil will be sent to a nice zoo to live out his days.  By “nice zoo”, of course, they mean a Military research facility.  Around the same time, Jimmy Garrett gets himself in trouble and is reassigned to the said Military project.  Being that it’s one of those need-to-know projects and Garrett doesn’t really need to know that much; all he’s told is that he’s to help chimpanzees learn to use flight simulators.   Every so often, he sees one leave, but they don’t come back.

Garrett does well enough that he’s let in on a little more information about the project.  Here’s the big twist:  It turns out that the chimpanzees are being experimented on.  Each chimpanzee is eventually  put in a flight simulator.  After a few minutes, he or she is hit with a lethal blast of radiation.  The point is to see how long a pilot could last if he’s hit by radiation.

Garrett has concerns about this.  First off, is it ethical to expose a living being to lethal doses of anything without their knowledge or consent?  Also, pilots will react differently to being exposed to radiation, especially depending on whether or not they know what’s happened to them.

The script was very well written.  Garrett finds himself in a situation where he should have known, but couldn’t really ask questions.  There’s also some moral ambiguity, even though you will probably find yourself clearly on one side or the other.

There is the issue of consent, given that Virgil signs and the other chimpanzees could be trained to do the same.  They do have intelligence and are very closely related to humans genetically.  Is it fair to send them in to a lethal situation not knowing what they’re doing or what the benefit is?  There’s a reason that humans weren’t used.

Don’t come in to this expecting a comedy or a family movie.  It’s not.  This is not Ferris Bueller’s Day off.  If you haven’t seen this movie and don’t know what’s coming, it will definitely blindside you, even though you know that something big is coming.  (This is also an issue for Garrett, as he should have seen it, himself.)

This isn’t to say you shouldn’t watch it.  It does bring up the issue of animal cruelty and the effectiveness of doing research on them.  Even though they’re so close, they don’t always react the same way as humans.  It was a very good movie and portrayed the chimpanzees sympathetically, which I suppose is the point of the movie.

I’d hold off on letting children watch it.  I don’t think many younger children would fully understand what was going on.  There are also some violent scenes towards the end, which might frighten some children.  It would be safe for teenagers on up. 

 Project X (1987) Movie Trailer

 IMDb page