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.