Review: FINDING DORY

Found Lots Of Tears But Lost Fun

2 stars

Mini Review:

‘Lost Nemo made us gazillions, let’s make a sequel!’

‘This time let us complicate things by losing Dory, and we’ll have the world working hard to find her.’

‘It will be wonderful because she’s already a sympathetic character. She has a disability.’

‘Will the kids think this to be too serious a subject?’

‘Naah! We’ll make her disability ‘cute’!’

Main Review:

‘Hi, my name is Dory. I suffer from Short Term Memory Loss...’ is repeated so often in the movie, you start to wonder if you should reach out with a pair of chopsticks into the screen and pick her out and say, ‘Sushi!’ after the twenty-thirdth time…

The memory loss is rather convenient. Because Dory begins to remember so many things and does so many things by saying, ‘What would Dory do?’ and the six year old inside you asks, ‘How does she remember that?’

Sometimes you wish they had thought up of the script first rather than say, ‘Let’s make a sequel!’

Plus, in the sequel, they forgot to add the fun elements that would make everyone laugh. Including the grownups. It’s hard to take this movie in a light spirit because you will worry for Dory, who suffers from short term memory loss and should not really be out there alone in the dark ocean, crying out for mommy. It was personally terrifying to imagine a child lost swimming around for years, not knowing where mommy and daddy are. The fish who swim by and don’t help are very scary and real. Children would probably chew their favorite toy to bits watching the horror unfold.

Pixar though, have not forgotten to create cute but grumpy character who becomes a reluctant hero. Hank the octopus. He brings a freshness to the script that was making me so miserable, I wanted to step out and call mom and dad. But then the script gets too complicated for its own good. You switch between Nemo and Dad looking for Dory and Dory looking for parents. And everyone is trying to get to some part of the sea sanatorium. The Sigourney Weaver joke is super fun, but then it remains just that one liner. No one stretches it to Alien fish or some other Avatar.

‘I cried buckets’ or ‘I was so-oh touched’ is what grown ups will say to each other while their kids would be holding on to the parents for dear life. Me, I asked, ‘How come Dory forgets everything else, practically but remembers that Hank is a Septopus and not an Octopus?’