Slumberland Review: Deals with Delicate Issues In An Empathetic And Sensitive Way

Cast: Jason Momoa, Marlow Barkley, Kyle Chandler, Weruche Opia, Chris O’Dowd

Director: Francis Lawrence

Streaming Platform: Netflix

Filmyhype.com Ratings: 3/5 (three stars) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]

Slumberland on Netflix is ​​a successful film, which through the creation of worlds deals with delicate issues in an empathetic way. The film is directed by Francis Lawrence, written by David Guion and Michael Handelman and produced by Peter Chernin, Jenno Topping, David Ready and Francis Lawrence. It is based on the 1905 comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McCay. The cast of Slumberland is led by Jason Momoa as Flip, the dancing and eccentric petty thief who becomes Nemo’s sidekick in Slumberland. Marlow Barkley as Nemo, an orphaned girl who will do anything to get what she wants. Kyle Chandler as Peter, her father. Weruche Opia is the iconic Agent Green, a cop from the world of dreams who wants to capture Flip at all costs. Chris O’Dowd as Phillip, the uncle.

The year was 2005, and the American director Francis Lawrence made his feature film debut with Constantine, an adaptation of a DC Comics comic whose protagonist, a demon hunter with the features of Keanu Reeves, moves between our world and the infernal one. Seventeen years later, with the complicity of Netflix, the filmmaker returns to deal with other worlds, this time from a less sinister perspective, and this is what we talk about in our review of Slumberland.

Slumberland Review: The Story

A little girl named Nemo and her father Peter live in a lighthouse. Peter raised Nemo by himself, teaching her everything there is to know about the job of a lighthouse keeper and telling her amazing stories of her past as an outlaw together with the fantastic Flip. One bad day, however, Peter dies as he had lived: at sea. Nemo is left alone. She would like to stay at the lighthouse, but she is entrusted to her father’s brother, Phillip, whom she had never seen. Phillip is boring, awkward, and doesn’t know how to handle the child’s suffering.

He ends up sending her to school. Nemo soon discovers that every time she falls asleep, she can enter Slumberland, the wonderful world of dreams. Here she meets for the first time Flip, her father’s old adventure companion, the same father of hers that she is determined to see again in the dream dimension to stay with him forever and never wake up again. Together, the strange couple formed by the eccentric satyr giant and the grieving girl faces their nightmares, including reality, improving each other.

Slumberland Review and Analysis

Nemo is Marlow Barkley, flanked by a histrionic and energetic Jason Momoa in the role of Flip, while Peter has the face of the always reliable Kyle Chandler, one of the fathers of cinema and television par excellence. Uncle Philip is a remarkably restrained Chris O’Dowd, indulging in one of his rare forays into more dramatic territory. Weruche Opia, an English actress who made her name in the miniseries I May Destroy You, tries to throw a spanner in Momoa’s works in the role of Agent Green, in charge of ensuring the smooth running of her dreams.

The film draws – very loosely – its inspiration from Little Nemo in Slumberland, the cornerstone of American comics by Winsor McCay, one of the pioneers of animation. A notable work for its use of oneirism as a ploy to go beyond the graphic conventions of the comic format as regards the composition of the cartoons, and a model for various other big names in the sector, including Vittorio Giardino, who reinterpreted the premise in an erotic vein with the parody Little Ego, and Neil Gaiman, who openly paid homage to McCay’s dream world in his The Sandman, another great illustrated foray into the universe that is created when we fall asleep. Alan Moore made a more direct operation, in the fourth volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen making Little Nemo appear, as a tribute to one of the great creations of the early years of American comics (the first weekly table dates back to 1905).

That said, of the imaginative power of McCay’s tables, even net of the poetic license to update the concept in a contemporary key, very little remains in this cauldron of hackneyed digital gimmicks that try to pay homage to Gilliam (the bureaucratic component of dream management ) but gets lost in an ocean of casual references that underline the algorithmic and somewhat cynical nature of the operation, where only the amused and sincere performances of the actors are partially saved (the work of Momoa and O’Dowd is particularly interesting in the second half of the film). Particularly distressing is that this insipid wasteland is the result of the direction of Lawrence, who years ago – in his debut, we recall – managed to make Hell memorable by transforming it into a post-nuclear Los Angeles.

Between huge amounts of green screens and special effects, the promising Marlow Barkley -who also premieres ‘The Spirit of Christmas ‘ on the same day- teams up with a more talkative Jason Momoa than usual to navigate this Dreamland. Nemo, who has been raised at home all her life, loses her father and finds herself suddenly having to live away from home with her non-parental uncle, go to school, and adjust to a new way of living far from the sea and his lighthouse. She is too much for a child, so the best way she finds to deal with it is by going on adventures that aim to see her father again.

A priori, the biggest attraction of the film was to see how Lawrence, along with screenwriters David Guion and Michael Handelman, shaped McCay’s comic. However, as other proposals that touch on the same subject have already shown, the world of dreams and its complexities give much more and see that here these are only made up of simple specific fantasies of their dreamers that are repeated in each visit, like those times when we close our eyes and start daydreaming about what we would do if we were rich because it feels too simple and harmless decision.

Slumberland Review: The Last Words

Slumberland is an entertaining family film that seems to have it all: highly influential original material, some pretty flashy special effects, a perfectly-functioning soundtrack, and charismatic enough leads. However, all this beautiful packaging suffers from that hole called the script which, in addition to the aforementioned problems, is not capable of moving people, of offering a real challenge to the characters or of shaking off its self-imposed children’s film label a bit. At least, his messages do end up being worth it.