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The Wild Robot Review

Since Hollywood has regressed into wokeism, directors and writers have made cringe a predominant narrative characteristic, a reason for movie-goers to stay home and watch movies from a time not poisoned by woke culture. The “message” has infected entertainment so deeply that fun, it seems, has flat-lined into a coma, except The Wild Robot is a sign of brain activity. Is this animated film enough of a wake-up call for us to smell the coffee, or, more accurately, the popcorn?

On its face, The Wild Robot tickles instant curiosity with an oxymoron for its title. Other, more expensive book adaptations have failed to hook so simply – calling out Disney’s John Carter, which was uninspired and gutted from the original book’s superior title, A Princess of Mars, attached to which was a truly grand story that got stripped of all its best parts to appease creatively bankrupt Disney. DreamWorks Animation wisely avoided repeating Disney’s bone-headed mistake.

Proud of its origin as a children’s book series by Peter Brown, directed and written by Chris Sanders, The Wild Robot rewards admission by supercharging its first ten minutes with a setup for the story that feels brisk without being disorienting and doesn’t try too hard for laughs by honoring the slapstick, cartoonish humor of beloved, timeless Looney Tunes.

The Setup

This story begins on the beach with the washed-up remains of a shipment after a lightning storm – cue Cast Away vibes here. Inside the torn shipment container is an intact, folded-up robot, which curious otters investigate and inadvertently activate. Powered on, the strange being introduces itself in multiple languages as ROZZUM of Universal Dynamics before mimicking the wildlife to escape a massive, oncoming ocean wave.

Having climbed a rock face in a crab-like fashion, the robot faces the tree line of a forest, at which point it taking its first steps into the wild. The robot tries making contact with the animals, offering assistance to every creature along its path, snapping photographs of the shocked creatures as proof of the completed task.

Quickly registering the language barrier as problematic, ROZZUM folds up like a standard-issue Trade Federation droid and enters “processing mode” for several days, absorbing data from the wildlife interactions, foliage gradually covering her up. The squeaks and squabbles of the animals become conversations, revealing the nickname the scared animals have given her, The Monster.

Emerging from the overgrowth, ROZZUM loudly broadcasts to all animals, using a dazzling, Las Vegas-style light show, that she’s there to help. One brave little ambassador bunny asks if ROZZUM wants to kill everyone. ROZZUM unwittingly replies, “Negative…” and, without skipping a beat, a moose knocks her to the ground with his antlers, only for her to recover unharmed. At this, the wildlife scatter in clouds of dust!

Servicing this island has gone beyond what ROZZUM was programmed for. At her wit’s end, or the lack thereof, she activates the homing beckon atop the island’s highest peak underneath storm clouds, expecting her creators to come pick her up. Of course, lightning strikes, and she’s back on the ground, up against the tree, and shortly thereafter, at the mercy of glowing, blue-eyed raccoons in the black of night. They overwhelm her for parts, including the homing beckon, which blinks green right when a raccoon snatches it.

Having recovered the homing beckon through a series of comical tussles, ROZZUM then gets chased through the trees by a ferocious bear until she loses her footing and falls to a ridge near the water where a nest meets her on impact. Sticking out from a pile of branches under pouring rain is a single adult goose wing, and sifting the wreckage reveals one unbroken egg with a living creature inside. ROZZUM doesn’t know what to do with it. A hungry fox comes along and snatches it, but she rescues the egg from the fox’s mouth.

The Emotional Hook

The egg cracks open. ROZZUM repairs it. A foot breaks through, and out from the shell comes a cute gosling who imprints on the robot, thinking its mother is the towering robot with complex subroutines and an inner core.

An Unlikely Pair

Overwhelmed by a closeup of his mother’s circular, robotic face, the gosling screams, but it’s attached at the hip. ROZZUM must raise the helpless little one, as Pink-Tail, a mother possum, followed by her 7-then-6 surviving baby possums, points out… The baby will die without a mother.

ROZZUM has found her task – a daunting one at that.

The Stakes

Making up the difference where the robot’s programming comes up short, Fink (the fox) and Pink Tail help direct on generally how to raise the gosling. The first step is food, followed by learning to swim, and finally, flight. Mother and child get nicknames: “Roz,” and “Brightbill.” Unfortunately for Roz as a first time mom, nurturing her child is not as simple as 1-2-3-done. Roz builds a home for Brightbill to eat and sleep safely as he grows.

Once Brightbill becomes an adult, his unlikely family “launches” him into a nearby lake for swimming lesson, which backfires in a way neither Roz nor Brightbill are ready for. Being a runt, Brightbill faces the pitfalls of integrating with others of his kind. He’s different, behaves as if he’s got modes and a processor, and, generally, has no clue how to be a goose in the wild. The others mock him mercilessly.

Despite the wedge between him and Roz, Brightbill faces a dire imperative. The senior goose leading the Great Migration warns Roz that if Brightbill doesn’t build endurance for the long journey, he will not survive the winter. The laws of nature apply to Brightbill regardless of his disadvantage to other geese, and the Great Migration demands more than wings. Where his wings faulter, his heart must pay the balance.

This is a matter of life and death, not a typical theme for an animated movie. But it’s a welcome one all-the-same in this harrowing struggle. Brightbill’s friends push him to stay in the air even when he gets tired. During the winter, while far away from the island, Brightbill, having trained to reach his full potential, finds that his past struggles prepared him to lead all geese out of a shooting gallery, a testosterone-inducing scene in which he has them form up behind him through a harrowing ground-to-air conflict reminiscent of daring World War 2 planes dodging ground fire.

Takeaways

As subtle as it may be to some, The Wild Robot is a highly sophisticated piece of entertainment, a blend of the story types institutionalized and underdog, promoting the qualities for greatness: Grit, hope, and courage against insurmountable odds. Roz discovers her wild side by breaking away from her programming to give the little one a chance at life in the wild. Brightbill takes on challenges none of his kind were trained to handle, and in doing so, becomes their leader.

Surprisingly, for a movie out of Hollywood, The Wild Robot contains powerful, counter-cultural themes of discipline and bravery, relegating agendas like global warming (glimpses of water-submerged landmarks) and inclusiveness (prey and predator living under one roof on the island during a killer winter storm) to mere aesthetic and humor-masked surface plot. These agendas tastefully take a backseat to the characters we care about, giving The Wild Robot an emotional edge over lesser films.

Such a heartfelt story elevates this Chris Sanders-directed film to on-par status with the likes of Pixar’s Wall-E, while firmly setting it outside the exclusive club consisting predominantly of Pixar’s earlier works, like Toy Story and Monsters Inc, and another film by DreamWorks Animation, The Prince of Egypt.

The Wild Robot earns its screen time at the theater where the smell of popcorn and stories adorn the walls of those sacred halls where imagination goes to fly. No time of death here. Storytelling is still fighting like Brightbill to survive the killer winter of wokism.

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Jesus Revolution Review

Directed by Brent McCorkle and Jon Erwin, “Jesus Revolution” is about the intertwining of the lives of a pastor, a former hippie, and a love-struck teenager, set against the backdrop of the American Christian church of the 1960s. The movie is a sincere, albeit candid, narrative about faith, setting itself apart from other Christian films by depicting believers as fragile, inflexible, self-righteous, egocentric, and troubled by trauma, rather than faultless and devout. It underscores Jesus Christ who ultimately embodies goodness as the true beacon of unity for us flawed, sinful individuals.

The moral cringe and preachiness that Christian films are known for failed to pass the audition phase for this production staring Kelsey Grammer (Frasier) and Jonathan Roumie (The Chosen). Chuck Smith, a modest Southern California church’s pastor, played by Grammer, shepherds a stiff, traditionalist congregation, but he is not the hero. The ex-hippie Lonnie Frisbee (Roumie), who befriends Smith with the goal of opening church doors to hippie converts, is God’s catalyst for breathing new life into Smith’s formal, dry church, and yet, neither he plays the hero.

Young and on a search to find himself, Greg gets led away from military school by the affection of a girl into a life of drugs, the hippie way to connect with the divine. Greg stumbles across Lonnie’s path because of a near-death experience, and they become friends. The charismatic, long-haired evangelist, guided by the Holy Spirit, begins the Jesus Movement, and Greg, clinging to a sense of belonging he gets from his friendship with Lonnie, is very much along for the ride. The only person weighing him down is his despondent, co-dependent mother. Greg here is the film’s protagonist, but true to the established pattern, he’s not the story’s hero.

There is a greater plan at work in America in the 1960s. Headed by Chuck Smith and Lonnie Frisbee, the Jesus Movement made waves across the nation, leading untold thousands to Christ with divine power unseen since in American history. The movement had such a profound impact, it is still felt today by those who lived it and saw their lives changed forever. Led not by charismatic razzle dazzle or an ingenious non-profit outreach strategy, the Jesus Revolution ignited a fire of faith in youth on a powerful and massive scale that only the mysterious whims of the Holy Spirit could accomplish. The movement is depicted as a radically unified gathering that saw miracles of equally radical proportions. No magician’s kits were used in the making of such a movement.

Sadly, to contrast the Holy Spirit, one pesky element had to rear its ugly features, the human condition. The nature of man had something to say about this matter, and it didn’t turn out beautiful like the changed lives of the people converted to a life of following Jesus. This masked spirit of darkness manifested in none other than Lonnie himself as the leader got taken by the publicity and mass appeal of the movement, a false sense of power and importance that drew his attention away from the sight of God.

This layer of Lonnie Frisbee’s story was noticeably absent from the film. While the omission of Lonnie’s less-than-righteous exploits frames the Jesus Movement as rosier than it is remembered by those who experienced it, the film nevertheless is a heartwarming reminder of what a spiritual revolution can look like when God’s jealousy for his beloved manifests in powerful ways that no man-made fabric of culture can hold back, let alone squelch, before God accomplishes his task(s).

Most importantly, “Jesus Revolution” highlights the Christian pursuit of righteousness, bolstered by the love of a relentless God who wants nothing less than the hearts of his people, naked and unashamed to call him LORD. Such a standard of righteousness is not easily cultivated. Humility in the face of pride and eyes fixated on God to turn away the fear of man and self-perception are necessary qualities for Christ to shine through.

Despite the flawed human element in Jesus Revolution, there is certainly a hero. There’s no use looking in conventional places for this hero. Classes on theology can’t promise to reveal the hero in hiding, least of all at the pulpit, in between the pages of the Bible from which the blue and black-suited pastor reads with stoic, crystal clarity. This hero made the first appearance at Pentecost where the Church felt for the first time the pure, unfettered power of God in their longues, which is exactly where Greg met the hero while submerged under water during his baptism with Chuck Smith, an army of teenage onlookers on the beach waiting for their turn to feel the fire of holiness from God in their chests.

“Jesus Revolution” portrays a divine encounter that ignites a lifelong bond with the Savior, who understands our suffering and molds our hearts to resemble his own—more valuable than gold or rubies.