Live Free Or Return of Planet of Movie Reviews Sans Title: Reckoning
This movie was fine. I pretty much got what I expected out of it. I want to get that out of the way up front, because I do not want to talk about the movie itself so much as its place in the world.
At first glance, one might compare this to Movie #1 and think, “CGI, fairy tale, princess… this is just more of the same.” I did at first. However, a significant theme in this movie is the relationship between mother and daughter. I found this odd, because mothers are usually conspicuously absent from these movies. What do you guys have against mothers over there?
This lead me to investigate the key difference between these two movies. This movie was produced by a company that so revolutionized this style of film making that their name is practically synonymous with it. It was distributed by their even-more-well-know parent company. Conversely, that other movie was (I guess) produced in-house by that same parent company. Which means that it has a place in said company’s “official canon”, and, perhaps more significantly, that movie’s protagonist is an official member of the character franchise.
Neither of those is true of this movie. Which is a shame, because I feel that this is a better example of the kind of movie that made that company famous than anything they have produced themselves in the last decade or so. (Present company excluded, of course.)