Ryan McNeil
It can’t be easy being the bad guy. Plumbers come in and steal your girl, yellow dudes steal your pellets and your fruit, and Zelda doesn’t even acknowledge you exist. Still, without bad guys, there would be no evil to defeat, no challenges to overcome – in short, no way for gamers to have any fun. “Bad guys serve a purpose” seems to be the point behind WRECK-IT RALPH, Disney’s newest animated offering.
I just wish they’d made their point with a little bit more imagination.
We meet Ralph (voiced by John C. Reilly) in a group therapy session called “Bad Anon”, where baddies from various video games come to vent. It’s here that we learn that he’s tired of being the outcast in his own game. He’s just doing his job as the bad guy, but that doesn’t mean he’s a bad guy. He is in fact lonely, and just wants some acceptance.
After the meeting he tries to reach out in friendship to the other characters in his game, but they want nothing to do with him. They’re only interested in honouring Fix-It Felix Jr (Jack McBrayer), the games hero and namesake who’s an all-around good-guy. Hellbent on acceptance and proof of what he’s made of, Ralph leaves the game.
When he learns that heroism is rewarded in a first-person-shooter game called Hero’s Duty, he sneaks into that game intent on proving his mettle. There he meets Calhoun (Jane Lynch), a character with a bitter back story that has left her callous and badass. While he’s an absolute tragedy as a Hero’s Duty soldier, he manages to steal away long enough to get his hands on the validation he so craves: a gold medal. With validation in-hand he sets out to go back home, but instead stumbles into a different game altogether.
He finds himself in Sugar Rush, a game that sets a grand-prix race in a world of candy. It’s here that he meets Vanellope (Sarah Silverman), a plucky little girl who likes to tease him, whenever she isn’t flickering in an out like a computer glitch. When Ralph learns that Vanellope is trying to build herself a racecar and enter the game’s race, he takes a shining to her and sees yet another opportunity to prove himself.
Meanwhile, back in the world of Fix-It Felix Jr., Ralph’s absence is being noticed, and the game might have its plug pulled if the absent villain can’t be found and put back in his rightful place.
WRECK-IT RALPH feels like it misses more than it hits. It feels like it wants to feed on the nostalgia of gamers, but beyond a few winks and easter eggs, there really isn’t anything nostalgic about it. Precious little time is spent glimpsing the outside world – the world where kids still pump quarters into game consoles in an arcade – and because of that, we have a hard time developing any real love for the characters inside the game consoles. Perhaps another reason we have such trouble developing any real affection for these characters is because they are all clearly based on existing game characters, and don’t do enough to establish themselves as anything more than stand-in’s.
Before I go too far, I want to mention a few things the film does well. Being a Disney film, it unsurprisingly gets the right amount of “sweet factor”. There are many moments between Ralph and Vanellope that play well. Once the two get to know each other, their relationship has an interesting dynamic – one of quickly-earned trust. It’s actually difficult to describe their relationship since it’s obviously not romantic, but becomes something more than friends. Ralph’s protective nature of Vanellope almost leads me to call the relationship older brother/younger sister, but even that doesn’t seem right. I would like to see these characters go on a different adventure in a better story, but I doubt I ever will.
I mentioned that many of the characters are stand-in’s, well so too are the worlds they inhabit. There’s a moment when Vanellope is leading Ralph through the landscape of Sugar Rush and they come upon a swamp of Diet Cola that sits beneath stalactites of Mentos. Anytime a piece of stalactite breaks loose and falls into the swamp, the results evoke what really happens when you would combine one with the other. This moment sticks out in my memory because it feels like the only real imaginative touch. Nothing else in the landscape of Sugar Rush, Fix-It Felix Jr., or Hero’s Duty ever reaches that stage of originality or inventiveness, and that feels like it runs counter to the limitlessness of the gaming world.
What’s worse, is that when the end credits roll we get glimpses of our four heroes showing up in actual video games like Street Fighter and Doom. Beyond the fact that it cements my belief that none of the worlds created are as interesting as the worlds in established video games, this sequence finally does create the sense of nostalgia the movie seemed so intent on creating but never could.
If it seems like I’m being hard on the film…well…I am. While kids will probably dig it, grown-ups will take precious little from it. The last decade has been a boon for animation both visually and in terms of storytelling, and WRECK-IT RALPH doesn’t hold a candle to any of them. Disney has chosen to play things safe and create something sweet and shiny to distract kids. Had they told a story with maturity and heart, or filled their film with the sort of visual splendour they are capable of, I might be ready to pop another quarter in the machine. Instead as the “Continue?” numbers count down to one, I shrug my shoulders and look for another game.
What spoke volumes to me about WRECK-IT RALPH was something I didn’t do. When I came home from my screening, I did not dig out a controller and start playing video games for the first time in months. I have a small stack of games collecting dust, and had the film really hit the right notes for me, I would have raced home and spent endless hours trying to beat bosses and advance levels. Instead, I hadn’t even thought of turning on my game console until right this moment. I compare this to a great film that merely uses a song on its soundtrack, and when I get home I cannot download the song fast enough. When a film builds its whole premise around an activity, and it can’t make me even mildly interested to get back into that activity, maybe that’s a sign that something has gone very wrong somewhere.
None of this is as important as the revolutionary short film that’s playing before the feature.
The short film is brilliant, but that’s not enough for me to enjoy the whole package.
That’s the crux of it, isn’t it? Fight Club had me wanting to beat the crap out of my friends, The Shining had me scanning the classifieds for winter custodian jobs – but if a movie of video games hasn’t grabbed you to jump back on the ol’ PS3, something must be amiss. Is it even worth seeing on big screen over small screen? Or all things equal?
Holy crap! Who woke up The Cynic!!?? (Good to hear from ya dude)
It’s been interesting to hear others tell me they were rather smitten with it, but for my money, there wasn’t the visual splendour on display that we got in films like RANGO, BRAVE, or HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON.
There’s characters in it your girls will love, so just earmark it for blu-ray.
It’s a not-very-well-kept secret that I worked in the video/computer game industry for a dozen years. From that perspective, I enjoyed the aspects of the various game worlds quite a bit. They seemed, more or less, accurate. The diet cola mountain is the sort of half-finished junk code that would stick around in a game. But, at the same time, designers and programmers won’t specifically design things that they don’t think the game needs. There wouldn’t be anything else in Ralph’s game aside from what is there–it makes logical sense. Game worlds aren’t limitless; they are exactly the size they need to be for the game, with places of junk code or half-finished parts here and there.
Similarly, how (pardon the pun) three-dimensional do you want bystander characters in video games to be? I was mildly surprised they had names at all in many cases.
I’d have liked to have seen more video game worlds–not more within each–but a larger number of game environments instead of the three we get.
I’ll admit that I haven’t loaded up an old game either, but I pretty much went cold turkey on video games in 2003 and haven’t much touched one since. Twelve years of doing it for a living will do that to you.
I didn’t find myself wanting more from the stand-by characters (like the plebs that inhabit Felix’s condo), but the five mains seem pretty thin. There’s precious little to either Felix or Vanellope, and Calhoun seems half-baked.
You’re right to point out that the gaming world isn’t as endless as it seems – that’s why I would have liked a little more from settings like Game Central, or that coding area that gets visited every once in a while. Heck, even the arcade feels like it’s underused.
I think back to my first experience with TOY STORY, and being taken aback by the amount of detail that went into rendering a heating duct that they crawl through “just so”.
At no point during WRECK-IT RALPH was I ever taken aback like that.
Fair enough. I agree that Game Central was underused. I didn’t mind there not being a lot going on in the arcade–I wasn’t really that interested in that environment.
My guess is that we were looking for different things from this film.
Agreed – and I don’t want it to sound like the movie in my imagination is better than the movie we got. I’m coming more from a place of lacklustre execution.
I guess they can’t all be winners.
Disagree strongly. I think the nostalgia of gaming was nothing more than a marketing tool (a clever wink, but nothing more) to get us old timers into the theater so that we could explore this world that held some really good ideas relevant to today’s society (What is a hero? What lengths should we go to be happy, at the cost of others’ happiness?). I certainly wasn’t hoping to go home and fire up the original Super Mario Brothers on the Wii I haven’t played in six months. For me that wouldn’ve made the film extremely shallow.
I see your point. However, once it got us old-timers into the theatre, it didn’t do all that much to entertain us. I wasn’t all that engaged with Ralph’s quest to be a hero, certainly not the same way I was engaged with Merida’s malcontent with being a princess. Maybe because we were just dropped right into Ralph’s malcontent. Had we got another scene or two of him doing his job, but growing despondent, I might have connected more.
I don’t think Ralph needs to do much to evoke any sense of nostalgia beyond permitting characters like Sonic to show up in the first place, but I also don’t think the real purpose here is to show nostalgia or even to explore the limitless expanse of the video game world (in the sense that there are so many games to explore, not in the sense that each world is limitless, since they’re not). The through-line here is Ralph’s journey to self-acceptance (which turns out to be a pretty utilitarian journey, since accepting himself ultimately means doing what it takes to foster happiness among the largest possible number of people).
Which is also why things stay in Sugar Rush. I like the idea of Ralph game-hopping a bit more, but his catharsis comes out of his relationship with Vanelope. He has to stay in Sugar Rush for character purposes, not just plot purposes, or else that relationship never develops and the film’s entire point gets lost. (Aside of genuine curiosity: why do I need to care about the kids playing the games to care about the characters in the game? They exist more or less in mutual exclusivity from one another; their only tie is that the players give the game characters their jobs. But that’s really it.)
I think people are going to peg this as a nostalgia piece about video games, but it’s not about video games. Those details, they’re just window dressing. What really matters is Ralph’s personal arc and his relationship with Vanelope.