Deep Dive Pixar: Wes Looks at Incredibles 2

Welcome one and all, to Deep Dive Pixar, the extremely belated sequel to Deep Dive Disney, and today, we’re taking a look at the long awaited follow up to the film that I personally have come to consider Pixar’s greatest masterpiece. That’s right, it’s time for Incredibles 2. We had to wait fourteen years, two terrible Cars sequels, a lame Cars spinoff and a terrible sequel to the lame Cars spinoff but we finally got our Incredibles sequel. While personally, I don’t think that this movie is quite as good as its predecessor, which to be fair is a pretty tall order, I still feel like this movie was worth the fourteen year wait, and in my opinion, does a much better job giving the entire family something to do than the first movie. So, what’s our story. Well, Incredibles 2 picks up right where our first movie left off, literally. The underminer is attacking the city and while our heroes do their best to save the day, they end up causing more collateral damage and don’t exactly do much to prove the lawmakers who banned supers in the first place wrong. The Underminer incident goes so horribly wrong that the government organization that helped the displaced supers in the first movie ends up getting disbanded meaning that Bob and his family are on their own and after Syndrome blew up their house, they’re basically stuck in a cheap motel until either Bob finds a job or the family ends up homeless. Fortunately, all hope is not lost as Bob, Helen and their best friend Lucious, aka Frozone, are contacted by eccentric billionaire and superhero fanboy, Winston Deavor. He and his sister Evelyn are working on a campaign to legalize superheroes again and have chosen Elastigirl as their poster child. This means Helen will have to resume superhero work while Bob stays home and takes care of the kids. While Bob slowly loses his mind playing Mr. Mom, Helen encounters a new villain called The Screenslaver, a mysterious criminal mastermind with advanced hypnosis technology. It’s a worthy followup to one of my favorite movies we’ve covered in this retrospective, so let’s dive right into, Incredibles 2.

Main Character:

While the first movie was firmly Bob’s story, this one definitely does a better job making the whole family feel like the star of the show. Helen gets the spotlight as she returns to superhero work, Jack Jack develops new powers, Bob has to learn what it takes to be a great stay at home dad and Dash and Violet are the ones who have to save the day in the end. I’ll try not to make this section too overly long but no promises.

Let’s start with Helen. Helen is still as she was in the first movie, uninterested in hero work because it’s against the law and she doesn’t want to put her family at risk. However, what we learn about Helen is that, despite her having adjusted better to civilian life than her husband, Helen clearly missed being a superhero just as much. You can tell in her voice just how giddy she feels at having stopped a bad guy again. We also get a lot of Helen being a solo hero in this movie and I like how her approach differs from Bob’s. Bob was blunt instrument, a powerhouse you throw at a bad guy to see them beat up, kind of like The Hulk but with control over his mental faculties. Nothing wrong with that approach, but Helen is different. She’s a bit more like Black Widow, with the added bonus of having stretchy powers. She proves that she’s actually pretty intelligent and is able to figure out what the Screenslaver is up to and sus out their true identity. I’d like to think that before she met Bob, she actually did some espionage work for the government. Maybe that was during her mohawk and motorcycle phase which I’m desperate to learn more about. Disney+, give me an Elastigirl prequel series, please!

Bob in this movie has to step out of the spotlight for a bit. He’s clearly jealous that he wasn’t the one picked, but he’s nonetheless happy for Helen. What gets to Bob is how Helen is great at the solo hero thing while he’s struggling to take care of the kids, something that Helen has done seemingly effortlessly for years. At first, he kind of goes a little crazy, especially after Jack Jack manifests his powers and essentially becomes a nuclear weapon with the mind of a toddler. However, I do like that once Bob puts in the effort, he’s actually really good at being a dad. He helps Dash with his math homework, he helps violet with her boy trouble and even gets control of Jack Jack with the help of our old favorite, Edna. While a lot of the movie focused on Bob and he’s more or less the same person he was last time, it’s still nice to see him getting more one on one time with his kids. It leads to more than a few sweet moments and a lot of laughs.

Finally, there’s the kids. They admittedly don’t get as strong an arc as their parents, but I do like that towards the end, it’s all up to them to save the day since all the other supers, including Frozone and their parents, have fallen under mind control. And, they do a pretty good job and you really get a sense that Helen and Bob are proud of them. Really great stuff all around.

Villain:

And yet another twist villain, and frankly, I think Evelyn Deavor is easily the worst offender and the aspect of this film chiefly responsible for it not being as good as its predecessor. And the worst part is, it didn’t start out that way. For the first half of the movie, The Screenslaver makes for a really cool and incredibly creepy villain, especially since you don’t actually see too much of them. Instead, Screenslaver speaks through their hypnotized victims, something that only requires them to be looking at a screen. There’s something incredibly unsettling about an enemy you can’t see, and if the movie had continued this trend, this could have been a villain to rival Syndrome. However, once the Screenslaver is revealed to be a falsehood, a creation of Evelyn as part of her plan to prevent the relegalization of supers, everything falls apart. See, Evelyn and Winston’s father loved Superheroes, much like Winston. He even had a direct line to Gazorbeam, you know, the super whose corpse Bob had to hide behind in the last movie. He died due to a home invasion shortly after the supers were outlawed. While Winston felt his father could have been saved if supers weren’t forced underground, Evelyn saw her father’s overreliance on supers as complacency. Evelyn believes that supers make people weak. Okay, that’s all well and good. In fact, it’s actually a solid motivation for a villain, but it doesn’t really line up with her actions. If she really wanted to keep supers illegal, then why would she even bother with the charade. She’s under no obligation to help her brother, she’s certainly smart enough to find employment in the private sector and while Winston is no dummy, he definitely would not be able to keep the company afloat without her technical expertise. Supers were already illegal, more so after the Underminer incident. So really, she didn’t have to do anything to keep supers illegal so you’re ultimately just left scratching your head after the big reveal and the cool concept that was The Screenslaver just feels wasted. If Evelyn say, wanted to legalize supers in order to build her own hypnotized army of super slaves to take over the world, that would make sense, but this, just, doesn’t. Evelyn also falls into the trap of being a predictable twist villain because the obvious suspect, Winston, is too obvious, so Evelyn is the only one who actually makes sense. Hell, her name is literally “Evil Endeavor.”

Side Characters:

I actually really liked Winston, voiced by the always awesome Bob Odenkirk. Once you realize that he’s not the twist villain, you realize that he’s just a big kid at heart. He memorizes all the super’s theme songs and gets excited like a little puppy when he gets a chance to see them in action. That said, he still follows the themes of the film. He has the wealth and resources to do real good in the world and he takes full advantage of that. Good stuff.

The movie introduces a bunch of new supers, basically to act as mind-controlled henchmen for Evelyn during the climax. The only one who actually stands out is Void, a super with Portal powers. I thought the way she looked up to Helen was really sweet, and I like how she helps Helen stop Evelyn in the end.

Frozone is back and he’s pretty much unchanged for the first movie. Still, Samuel L. Jackson is always a welcome presence in any movie and this is no exception. I actually really appreciate some of the small touches they add to his friendship with the Parr family, such as him offering to put the Parr family up at his place, him having voice access to Mr. Incredible’s Superhero car or simply just how happy Bob is to see him when he shows up to help fight The Underminer.

Finally, there’s my favorite character, Edna Mode. I loved Edna in the first movie, I love her even more in the second movie. Edna being pissed that Helen would dare wear a costume form another designer is utterly hilarious. I’m surprised she didn’t roll up on the Parr house in a Sherman tank the second she found out. However, Edna also shows her softer side in this film, particularly when she becomes Jack Jack’s babysitter and forms this adorable bond with the little guy. I swear, I want to hug them both so much.

Memorable Scenes:

This was a no brainer for me. I love any scene where a heavily sleep deprived Bob is struggling to deal with taking care of the kids on his own. Violet is having boy trouble, Dash’s teachers have apparently changed math and Jack Jack is probably on the verge of blowing up the house. Bob, a guy with super-human strength who was able to singlehandedly take down a giant robot in the last movie, but raising three kids alone, the poor guy is in over his head and it shows. Bob could call Helen but his own pride won’t allow it and besides, he doesn’t want to bother his wife when she’s finally out there fighting crime again so Bob has to buckle down. At one point, Bob snaps and goes on this crazed rant to pump himself up, and how he’s Mr. freaking Incredible and not Mr. So-So! He eats lightning, craps thunder and is apparently a really big fan of rocky! I think the reason I like these scenes so much is how relatable I found them to be at the time. When I first saw this movie, I was working two very time-consuming jobs, one of which just happened to be in the middle of its busiest time of the year. I was lucky if I was getting three hours of sleep per night. So, seeing a physically and emotionally drained Bob sitting on the couch with bloodshot eyes, barely able to keep it together, really hit close to home for me.

Story:

Most of the themes from the original film, such as the importance of family, Brad Bird’s idea of the Mundane and the Fantastic, the nature of an innate desire to do good and how that can still be selfish and using ones gifts to do good in the world are all pretty much still here this time around. They also try to add this whole thing about how heroes create complacency in society but much like the villain who espouses this philosophy, it’s not executed especially well.

The Dark Disney Factor:

This one definitely tones down the Dark Disney Factor from the last movie, or at least doesn’t contain anything as unsettling as attempted suicide or hiding behind your friends decaying corpse to avoid detection by a giant robot. The darkness in this movie mostly comes from the Screenslaver, waste of potential though they may have been. Like I said, seeing this mysterious unseen menace communicating through mind-controlled slaves, which at one point includes a little girl, is pretty messed up. It gets worse when Bob and Helen fall under Screenslaver’s control and are stripped of their own free will, forced to fight their own family. We know Bob and Helen as these likable characters who just so happen to have superpowers. Stripped of all their individuality and free will and reduced to puppets for a mad woman, you’re reminded just how powerful, and how dangerous they really are.

Final Thoughts: While Incredibles 2 does not quite reach the heights of its phenomenal predecessor, I still feel that there is a lot to like about this movie. It's got a lot of the same things that made the first film as great as it was and continues to build upon that in new ways. Overall, I feel that this is a worthy sequel to Pixar's greatest masterpiece. Speaking of sequels, next time we'll be covering another one, which also happens to be the only remaining movie in Disney's animated canon that I have not seen. Join me next time as Ralph Breaks the Internet.