Ralph Breaks the Internet

Back when the first Shrek film came out in 2001, it was a clever, sometimes borderline naughty take-off on Disney-style fairy tales with perfect, demure princesses and bland, hunky princes who fought the dragon to save the day. What made it great besides a fun soundtrack and solid voice work was its focus on dismantling fairy tales and reassembling them in the light of the 21^st century. When its inevitable sequel was released in 2004, something had shifted. Having mined a lot of the familiar tropes already, the second film shifted its focus to pop culture and used a fairy tale setting to mock our celebrity-obsessed modern world. It was a decent follow-up but it had lost what made the first worthy of a sequel in the first place. 

 I was thinking about this dynamic when I watched the sequel to 2012’s Wreck-It Ralph, Ralph Breaks the Internet. In the first film, as you may recall, Ralph is the giant, ham-fisted bad guy of an 80s era video game. He befriends Vanelope Von Schweetz, a smart-allecky and diminutive driver from the arcade game, Sugar Rush. The two of them go on a hero’s quest for Ralph to prove he’s a good guy and for Vanelope to discover who she really is. It was an original, beautifully done story that lovingly explored the nostalgic world of arcade games.

With Ralph Breaks the Internet, a Shrek situation has happened. Having tapped out the original concept, the filmmakers had to find a new area to explore, and of course, what else would it be other than online gaming and the Internet in general? So we find Ralph and Vanelope escaping their quaint, contained arcade world into the endless, overcrowded madness of the web. They see digital trees full of Tweets, a massive tower looking over everything representing Google, and millions of packages shooting out of the Amazon tower. Ostensibly, they’re on a quest to find a replacement steering wheel for Vanelope’s game so it doesn’t get shut down, but of course, the film is actually about growing up, finding your place in the larger world, and also about letting go as people in your life, grow, mature, and need to move on.

As much as I enjoyed the first film, I had a harder time getting into its sequel. The entire first half of the movie felt more devoted to the cleverness of visualizing the internet as a concrete, tangible place than it did to the characters or story. Countless hours of design and thought went into depicting the Internet as a vast city with shady neighborhoods, high speed highways, and billions of digital residents, but more time should have been spent developing the characters and plot, some of which feels secondary and undercooked.

The central conflict rests in Vanelope discovering Slaughter Race, a Grand Theft Auto-type racing game full of danger and unpredictability, just what she was missing in her quaint arcade game. Ralph wants her to come back to their contained world rather than venture out where it’s not only dangerous but also far from him. Like a lot of Disney films, it’s a thinly veiled metaphor for parent and child relationships, just the kind of thing to hit both kids and their movie-ticket purchasing parents right in the feels.

Ralph Breaks the Internet feels as though the filmmakers got caught up in their cleverness and lost a bit of what made the original great, much like first two films of our friend, the green ogre from the early 2000s.

Critics and Audiences

There’s an instructive sequence about a third of the way into Bohemian Rhapsody, the new Freddie Mercury biopic. We’ve just seen the band led by Rami Malek as Mercury battle with a record exec over the infamous song of the film’s title. The exec, played winkingly by a heavily make-upped Mike Meyers has pointed out that it’s unusually long, not to mention deeply weird and that it wasn’t deserving of single status. The band walks out, releases it as a single anyway, and we hear it as a series of quotes from music critics of the time appear on the screen. Critic after critic brands the song “meandering,” “bizarre,” “non-sensical.” The words crowd the screen and then suddenly are literally blown away by the band playing the song live in front of a screaming crowd. The implicit message is that critics don’t matter. That haters gonna hate, but ultimately, a song’s worth (or a film or book or whatever) is determined by the people who love it and are moved by it. 

It’s hardly the main point of the movie and serves more as a funny, rock-and-roll middle finger to all the fools who didn’t appreciate Queen’s genius back in the day. But it raises an interesting question that’s perhaps even more prominent now than it was when Freddie, Brian, Roger, and John set stages ablaze with their eclectic, electric brand of rock. Thanks to review aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes and MetaCritic, you can know at a glance what scores of critics across the country and the world have to say about a film before it even hits your theater. In some ways, this gives professionals and (ahem) semi-professionals who critique films an exposure and power like never before. I have a friend who absolutely swears by Rotten Tomatoes, for instance, refusing see anything that’s not rated at least 70% fresh.

 But these sites also have a place for everyday audience members to log their own scores of films, and we have a “Bohemian Rhapsody” moment whenever critics hate something but audiences love it. Most recently, the supervillain movie, Venom, scored a lousy 29% with critics but a resounding 87% with audiences on Rotten Tomatoes. The gap isn’t as profound, but with Bohemian Rhapsody the film, the discrepancy is there with an unenthusiastic 66% rating from critics and 97% from audiences.

So what do we make of it when there’s such disparity between how the trained and the untrained react to something? Rather than get into arguments about who is right or wrong, it’s more useful to examine what it is that each group values.

A critic is generally looking at the big picture, examining how everything hangs together, how the plot, script, performances, cinematography, editing, and music form a series of patterns and variations to all add up to something larger than the individual parts. They try to place the movie in its historical context and articulate how it does or doesn’t do anything new or have anything to say.

An audience member is often interested in the experience of the film itself. Did it make me laugh? Did it make me cry? Did it make me want to dance? Yes, "Bohemian Rhapsody" the song is long and weird, but when Brian May begins shredding with that muscular, chunky guitar solo, who cares?

So it isn’t that critics are right and audiences are dumb or that critics are snobs and audiences have a pulse on what’s actually important. On the contrary, even though it is communal, film spectatorship is ultimately individual – but those personal experiences can be influenced and informed by friends at work, the Pulitzer Prize winning critic posting on the internet, the person sitting next to you in the theater, and even the guy on the radio. When there is a Bohemian Rhapsody-like discrepancy between critics and audiences, that’s all the more reason to go see if for yourself and figure out what you think.

Bohemian Rhapsody

Bohemian Rhapsody is a rock biopic about Freddie Mercury, the flamboyant and electrifying frontman for the 70s and 80s powerhouse band, Queen. The film begins when Freddie was still known as Farrokh Bulsara (at least by his family) and was a design student in London working as an airport baggage handler. Barely spending any time at home with his very traditional Indian/Persian parents and sister, the self-named Freddie spends his nights prowling clubs, listening to bands. He happens to be in the right place at the right time when the lead singer of a local band called Smile quits. With a quick, improvised audition while standing in a parking lot, Freddie is in the newly re-christened Queen and his ascent to rock royalty begins. 

 Despite a two and a half hour run time, the film clips along quickly, never dwelling for long on any one period of Mercury or the band’s life. They play local gigs and then sell their van to fund the production of their first album. It gets the attention of a record company that gives them time and funds to record a follow-up, which includes the infamous song of the film’s title, “Bohemian Rhapsody.” The record execs doubt the song and refuse to release it as a single. Mercury finds a way to get the song on the radio anyway, and Queen goes on to be one of the biggest bands in the country and the world. Mercury, despite being common law married to a nice girl named Mary, finds himself straying while on the road, usually with men. He eventually embraces his homosexuality privately while the band only gets bigger and more successful.

The main conflict of the film comes in the form of the villainous Paul Prenter, Freddie’s personal manager, who manipulates Mercury into going solo and then isolates him from the band and other opportunities. Eventually, Mercury figures out what’s going on, banishes Paul, returns to the band, and goes on to perform their triumphant set at 1985’s Live Aid in front of an audience of over a billion people. We also see Mercury get diagnosed with AIDS as well as find lasting love in Jim Hutton.

It’s a lot to pack in, and the film suffers from some typical biopic problems. The water is wide but not necessarily deep. We get a good if not always historically accurate overview of Mercury’s history with his band, but we don’t really learn much about what drove them, personally or musically. The other members of the band are largely only there are foils for their front man and never really come across as much other than a good bunch of guys usually shaking their heads at wacky ol’ Freddie.

Bohemian Rhapsody’s biggest problem is that it is formulaic. It is structured like many other rock movies – it opens with the artist about to perform an iconic show but then casts the viewer back to how it all began, so the film can then end with that performance that we all know is coming. Whether it’s Cash at Folsom or Mercury at Wembley, the formula is the same. The irony is that Queen was one of the least formulaic bands ever. Their music was such an unpredictable mishmash of rock, boogie-woogie, opera, country, and everything else they could throw in there, this somewhat predicable film hardly does the spirit of their music justice.

However, having said that, when the film just centers on the band and Rami Malek’s wonderful performance as Mercury, the concerns about predictability and formula just sort of melt away. The music, as ever, is propulsive, electrifying, and downright fun. The recreation of the band’s exhilarating twenty minute set for Live Aid is joyous and almost as good as the real thing. Bohemian Rhapsody as a film is hardly groundbreaking, but it does do a surprisingly effective job of capturing what made Queen a groundbreaking band.