A girl named Nemo (Marlowe Barkley) lives with her freedom-loving father (Kyle Chandler) on an island isolated from civilization. When her parent dies at sea, the heroine is sent to live with her own uncle Philip (Chris O’Dowd), whom she has never seen before. He is the exact opposite of her brother: a reticent, unsociable, interested only in door locks (he runs a company for their production). Nemo hides from the bleak reality of reality in her dreams. In them, the girl meets Flip (Jason Momoa), a character from her father’s night stories, a brash and boisterous man with goat horns. He declares that Nemo must help him find a certain pearl in the Land of Dreams. She is supposed to help Flip remember who he is. And the girl can meet her father again – albeit in a dream.
“Dreamland” is loosely based on the works of Winsor McKay, a cartoonist from the early 20th century and, incidentally, a pioneer of animation: he was one of the first to experiment with capturing moving drawings on camera. Stories of “Little Nemo in the Land of Dreams” McKay made, however, in the form of comics – also for his revolutionary years. Winzor changed the shape and size of individual frames, sought ways to creatively convey through drawing the experience of being in a surreal dream, and finally, openly mocked the medium and broke the “fourth wall” (it was, we recall, the 10th years of the last century). His work later inspired Walt Disney, the author of Maus, Art Spiegelman, and even Federico Fellini.
On the big screen, his works have already been tried to be adapted. In 1989, a joint American-Japanese cartoon “Little Nemo: Adventures in Dreamland” was released: a curious film, but it failed miserably at the box office. Netflix’s “Dreamland” is only the second attempt to bring McKay’s fantasy into the movie space. And it seems to have failed again.
And it’s not because the creators plowed through the entire plot of “Little Nemo” and built theirs from echoes of the original work. That’s just not the problem: for all of McKay’s artistic genius, he wasn’t the best storyteller. But because the Netflix picture can’t capture even one-hundredth of the creative power of a comic book from a century ago. If “Little Nemo” broke notions about the possibilities of its art form, creating something new and audacious, “Dreamland” is as featureless and passive a movie as it can possibly be. Another streaming “content,” not particularly bad and certainly not too good.
In theory, the dream world in the film is supposed to act as a kind of antipode to Nemo’s boring gray reality with its sterile glass schools and lifeless uncle’s apartment populated by door locks of various ages and sizes. Except that in reality it looks exactly the same faded. The entire Dreamland is five unimpressive locations, some of which are also rather lousy computer-drawn. However, it was strange to expect any vivid surrealism from Francis Lawrence, the author of “Constantine”, “I am Legend”, “Red Sparrow” and a couple of parts of “The Hunger Games”. He is a very uneven director as it is, but more importantly, the kind of director who cannot be called a big fantasist. The texture of “Dreamland” would rather suit some Jean-Pierre Genet, Del Toro or, ideally, Terry Gilliam. Though the latter already has “Tide Land,” essentially a tougher version of the same story.
Lawrence’s directorial creativity is at most enough to occasionally launch a free-flying camera around the characters, which is apparently how he shows the chaotic nature of the dream world. Almost all the striking images like the bed walking around the city in the film are taken directly from McKay. Only Winsor’s love of racial stereotypes did not get adopted (times were different): they were all packed into one harmless joke about Canadians. It must have taken a long time to pick the ones they could still laugh at.
But, more importantly, the whole limitless potential of dream stories was reduced to a completely secondary drama about the acceptance of death. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the very idea of making a children’s movie about a complex problem. Except that in a world spoiled by Pixar, it’s hard to get into the millions of times-repeated truths. Pain has to be accepted in order to get over it and move on. Sometimes what we seem to want is not what we really need. In addition, “Dreamland” speaks the already unsophisticated moral out loud: there are two heroines who in the middle of the film give Nemo little séances of psychoanalysis and chew up the bored viewer all the metaphors.
Such fundamental scripted passivity is not helped by the charisma of Jason Momoa, essentially playing a local version of Jack Sparrow (playing well, but why – Sparrow is already there). Nor the sincere efforts of the other actors: Chris O’Dowd seems to be too good for this movie. “Dreamland” is made with good intentions, but with the wrong hands. For a film about fantasies and daydreams, it surprisingly lacks any creative spark.