Strange World Review

The design department did its job and almost nobody else did. The interior world the Clades fall into is a real invention, pink membranes and blue lightning grass and a horizon that behaves like tissue, built out of old pulp magazine covers. Splat, the wordless blob that communicates by changing shape, is the only character not busy explaining himself.

Everybody else talks in therapy language. Searcher, Jaeger and Ethan are three generations of one argument about whether a father gets to choose his son's life, and the script states that argument, restates it, then has the characters announce aloud that they have learned from it. Gyllenhaal voices Searcher as a decent, tired farmer, a pleasant choice and a flat one, while Dennis Quaid plays the grandfather at a single volume.

Ethan being a gay teenager whom nobody in the story treats as remarkable is handled with more grace than anything else in it. The larger failure is stakes. Once you register that the world is an animal, the ending is legible an hour early, and nothing between the reveal and the finish carries risk. The energy crisis that starts the plot is simply dropped until it is needed again.