Deus ex octopus

One of the things I find less satisfying about Finding Dory than Finding Nemo -- like, 2.5 stars less satisfying -- is that I didn't feel that sense of impossibility.

When Gill and the other fish are trying to figure out a way to spring Nemo from the aquarium in the office of the Sydney dentist, you sit there and think "Uh uh. No way. They can't do it. They're just fish." As they size up the obstacles and challenges, the camera moves with their eyes from one obstacle to the other. Their eyes are your eyes. You, too, think there's just no way. It's all too big. It all requires too many opposable thumbs.

So then when they do find a way, by hook or by crook, to get themselves all out to the open ocean, it's just one of those beautiful moments of movie magic. They did it. Somehow, they did it.

The characters in Finding Dory don't have that problem. They have Hank the Octopus.

There are such a bewildering and dizzying array of set pieces in Finding Dory that I probably can't enumerate the instances for you, but I don't think I'd be exaggerating if I said there were ten times that a seemingly impossible pickle was resolved quickly by Hank fishing a tentacle into some sort of liquid or other and fishing out some combination of Nemo, Marlon and Dory. Maybe not quite the number of times Dory trails off mid-sentence, her eyes going blank as she remembers some part of her history, then races off like a crazy person, but almost that many times.

The characters were not left to figure out how to do what they needed to do. No, they had a deus ex machina.

Or rather, deus ex octopus.

Now, I do think Hank is a pretty good character. His fixation on a plastic tag that will be his ticket to a Cleveland aquarium notwithstanding -- a plastic tag that's way out of scale with his octopus-sized girth, and has no obvious place to affix itself to him -- he does make for one of the more interesting additions to the cast. I can't say the same for the two whales, for example. The sea lions are only slightly better.

But his almost superhero-like abilities -- to go in and out of water, to change his color to match the background, even to take the shape of some object he had presumably never before attempted to imitate -- just ruined it for the rest of them. Marlon, Dory and Nemo are all essentially along for the ride on the Hank Express. Nothing is impossible, and everything is possible.

And nothing is earned.

I'd had the misfortune of hearing two different podcast reviews of Finding Dory before I finally watched it, and both reviews mentioned the exhaustion factor of the daisy chain of set pieces and multitude of instances of fish being transferred from one body of water to another. But I'm pretty sure I would have felt that exhaustion even if I weren't steeled for it. I can tell you that my eyelids were certainly exhausted by the end of the running time.

I gave Finding Nemo five stars. I gave Finding Dory half that. It's certainly not Pixar's worst movie, but it may be Pixar's worst sequel. Yeah, I like Cars 2 better.

Finding Dory is a regrettable reminder of the era we are in, the era we are now returning to. Inside Out was a glorious anomaly within an overall Pixar sequel trend. The Good Dinosaur was also an anomaly, but it was not glorious. Now we won't get anything conceptually new from the studio -- outside of its wonderful shorts, like Piper -- until at least 2020.

I think I need an all-powerful octopus to curl one of his tentacles in and save me from Cars 3, Toy Story 4 and The Incredibles 2.

Am I really going to just not see Finding Dory?

It's been more than two weeks since Finding Dory hit theaters, and I have yet to see it.

The two weeks are significant because most cinema chains only allow me to use my critics card to see a movie within the first two weeks of its release. I am very congizant of that deadline and yet I have let it pass on Finding Dory.

So I had to ask myself: Am I going to just not see this in the theater?

It's not the craziest question for most people. Most people these days don't give a shit whether they see something on the big screen or the small screen, or, increasingly, whether they see it at all.

But you're talking to a guy (or reading a guy, anyway) who made a Pixar movie his #1 movie of last year. And who ranked Finding Nemo as not only his #2 movie of 2003, but as his 16th favorite movie of the 2000's.

I should be all over that shit like white on rice. To put it crudely.

And yet I haven't been. For this, I blame my son.

Time was if a movie was animated and was going to be in movie theaters, I could sell my son on it. Or rather, he didn't need selling. He either didn't fully understand what we were doing, or hadn't yet developed the agency to state an opinion on it. We just went and Daddy knew best.

But he's almost six, and now he has an opinion about everything.

When I asked him if he wanted to see the sequel to Finding Nemo -- which he's seen at least twice -- his answer was non-commital to negative. In fact, worse than that, it was almost condescending. "No thanks," he said, as if he was way above movies about fish swimming around in the ocean. The condescending part was that I could detect in his tone that he was trying to let me down easily. A sign of maturity as well, I suppose, but forgive me if I'm not seeing the silver lining at the moment.

My wife tried again on a separate occasion and got no traction either.

But it's been ages since I've gone to see an animated movie in the theater without being accompanied by my son. I don't feel like I need him as an excuse to go, but I've just gotten so out of the habit of it. It's a nice way of killing two birds with one stone -- I get to see a movie, and we get an activity that helps move the day closer to bedtime. (If you think that's a cynical view of parenting, you probably aren't a parent.) I feel like instances of killing only one bird should be reserved for movies my son can't see with me.

In fact, if you want to find the last animated movie I saw in the theater without my son, you have to go all the way back to the 9th of November, 2012. That's when I saw Wreck-It Ralph with two friends. Ever since my son's first theatrical experience -- Planes, on September 21, 2013 -- I haven't seen an animated movie in the theater without him.

I could easily let the streak continue. I have a precedent of not budgeting theater time for Pixar sequels. I saw Monsters University on video, and I didn't even see Cars 2 in the year of its release. I saw it two years later. Who's to say Finding Dory should be any different? Who's to say it's any less of a cash grab? The critics I've seen seem to be divided on its value.

But then there's the part of me that doesn't want to miss something that could be great. And if I'm looking at precedents, it may be more instructive to look at animation in general. My #1 movie of last year was Inside Out, another Pixar film, and my favorite movie out of 35 so far this year is Zootopia, another Disney film. If Dory has a chance to be in those movies' ballparks, I should make time for it.

And so I think I will. In fact, I've decided to go tonight. That is, assuming I don't collapse from exhaustion sometime around 6:45. I did wake up at 4:30 this morning, and was never able to get back to sleep.

I said earlier that "most" chains don't let me see a movie for free if it's been out for more than two weeks. Not all. So fortunately, I still won't have to pay.

Mike Wazowski and Lightning McQueen may not have deserved a chance in theaters for their sequels, but Dory the fish does. She's earned my trust, I think.

So tonight, find her I shall.