November 28, 2022
When Searcher (Jake Gyllenhaal) was still a young man, he went with his famous explorer father Jaeger Clade (Dennis Quaid) on an expedition to cross one of mountains surrounding their land of Avalonia. Midway, Jaeger wanted to study a new energy-generating plant he called Pando. However, his father insisted to go further into the wilderness and forged on ahead in anger. He never made it back home again since then.
Twenty five years later, Searcher is now a farmer of Pando, which has since been used as the energy source of Avalonia. He is married to pilot Meredith (Gabrielle Union) and had a gay teenage son named Ethan (Jaboukie Young-White), who would rather go on adventures than to stay in the farm. One day, the president of Avalonia Callisto Mai (Lucy Liu) recruited Searcher to join her on a mission to save Pando's root system from attack.
I have to admit that the trailer they released earlier this year did not make me want the movie. No one among the human characters popped out that would encourage audiences to follow his story. None of the alien-looking gelatinous creatures looked particularly interesting to know more about, nor were they cute enough in the typical sense for little kids to clamor for. It was a trailer that did not exactly catch anyone's attention.
As you watch the prologue, you already get a sense that a father-son disagreement will underpin the whole story, a plot device which had been tackled so many times before. The introduction of Avalonia and Pando took so long, really dragging down the pace of the film at the very start, something the film could not recover from anymore even as the "adventure" proper was already underway. Most of its supposed "comedy" parts were not funny at all.
As wokeness is the trend in films these days, there was much representation going on here in the cast of characters. Searcher and Meredith were a mixed-race couple, and they had a gay son. Ethan Cade is the first openly gay lead character in a Disney film. Not because he was gay, but as written, Ethan was not exactly a likable character. With the sassy way he talked back to his father, it was not easy to sympathize with what he was going through.
I did like how they came up a major unexpected 11th hour twist in the story about the true nature of Pando and the creatures attacking it. Admittedly, it was rather a big stretch about how the humans finally figure out what had been happening all along just by seeing one single giant eye. For Ethan in particular to arrive at the correct deduction came out of nowhere. Anyhow, it was good, but by then, it was already too late to save the film. 5/10.
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