In reading through various folks’ reviews of The Incredibles, it seems that pretty much everyone enjoyed it (with a few Scrooge-like exceptions), but that a number of people seemed sensitive to something I really hadn’t given a second thought: death.
People die in this film. Not gorily or grotesquely or bloodily or even on-screen. But people die. People are killed. Mr. I, in reviewing the Kronos Project, runs across lengthy references of dead individuals (and even encounters some skeletal remains). More directly, assorted and sundry henchmen of the villain are wiped out in the island battle, several of them at the hands of Dash and Violet, the two kids.
Is The Incredibles “SpatterGoreFest 2004”?
I guess it’s a matter of perspective. I didn’t think so. I didn’t see anything that isn’t implicitly or explicitly present in any number of other super-hero comics and movies. Indeed, the threat and impact of death was a lot more present, it felt, in the last Pixar outing, Finding Nemo, which starts out with Nemo’s mom and hundreds of egg-brethren getting killed and eaten — though, again, offscreen — and continues with predators, abusive pet owners, and fishing nets as things to worry about.
A mook in a flying saw-saucer disappears in a fiery explosion running into something while trying to kill our under-age hero? Really doesn’t strike me the same way. Indeed, I’d have probably been more upset if we’d seen them all descending in little parachutes …
Am I being insensitive? Have I permanently warped (okay, further warped) my daughter by taking her to this? Given that it was a PG film (I know a lot of folks probably thought, walking in, that it was a G — since, after all, we’re talking Disney/Pixar here), is all this a tempest in a bloody teapot?
Do kids that see this movie also watch the Star Wars films? Just try to keep track of the body count in those movies! Stormtroopers and Rebels are dying like flies. A whole Star Destroyer was pulverized by an asteroid, and they have huge crews. Heck, how many people were aboard the Death Star when Luke blew them all to atoms? And don’t forget Alderaan!
If people are going to be concerned about sanitized violence in movies, this probably isn’t where they should start.
I actually thought about Star Wars as I was writing this up (and looked it up — that’s rated PG, too).
I suspect that, despite the rating, many folks walked into it thinking, “Pixar! It will be as cute and kid-friendly as Toy Story and Finding Nemo and Monsters Inc.” All of which films also have some disturbing and scary content in them. (Of course, there are plenty of parents who appear to have brought their kids to Team America thinking it was a cute little kiddie movie — “Puppets!” — too.)