Dwayne
You know…for a company that’s taken as much abuse lately as Disney has, I’m kind of surprised to see them pump out some good movies. The newest of which involves a recently-released trailer for Race to Witch Mountain, based on the low-grade films of the seventies of the same name.
Featuring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Annasophia Robb, Race to Witch Mountain involves a couple kids who might be aliens on the run from an intergalatic bounty hunter with a raftload of onboard weaponry who must get back to their ship which happens to be somewhere near Witch Mountain.
Okay, so there are some problems with it. So the bounty hunter’s weaponry is apparently categorized by a charging whine before firing, which is probably a massive design flaw. Can you see this actually being part of a design meeting somewhere? “Hey, Zorgo…let’s make sure we warn everybody before this thing fires!” “What should we use, Margulak? A siren?” “Naaah, we used that on the photon torpedoes. Let’s just have it emit a whining noise while it initializes.” “Works for me. Let’s go get lunch!”
So there’s some other rather dicey sequences involved, like the kid / maybe aliens are talking to dogs and whatnot, but still, this looks like it might be a pretty decent movie.
Sure, we’re all a bit spoiled by out-of-nowhere surprise hit Pirates of the Caribbean, but we all remember The Haunted Mansion. It’s strange to say but the evidence really seems to be bearing it out–Disney’s strength is no longer in cartoons. Pixar pretty much destroyed any chance of Disney ever looking good in animation EVER AGAIN, but Disney can still clock out the occasional good live-action title. The entire Pirates trilogy (possibly going on to full franchise) was too good to miss.
And if Race to Witch Mountain can hold it together, well, Disney may have just found its new millenium business model. And only ten years in too…all riiiiight.
Leave a Reply