Don Hall and Qui Nguyen’s Strange World begins on renowned explorer Jaeger Clade (Dennis Quaid), who casts an imposing shadow over his remote mountain-locked village of Avalonia, but even more so over his 15-year-old son, Searcher (Jake Gyllenhaal), who he’s trained all his life to follow in his footsteps. In the film’s prologue, we get a glimpse of the tension that ultimately drives father and son apart. Upon stumbling across a glowing plant that may revive their dying community, and which he dubs pando, Searcher decides to turn back and share his discovery, while Jaeger, whose lifelong dream is to cross the impossibly steep mountain range that surrounds them, stubbornly presses on only to ultimately go missing.
The story then picks up 25 years later, with Avalonia now a booming metropolis, powered by pando, which Searcher farms with the help of his wife, Meridian (Gabrielle Union), and teenage son, Ethan (Jaboukie Young-White). Avalonia appears to be something of a fully functioning utopia, with everyone working in harmony. It’s as good a place as any for Disney to finally introduce their first out gay teen character, with Ethan awkwardly flirting with his classmate, Diazo (Jonathan Melo), and carrying a flame for him for the rest of the film.
Strange World wisely doesn’t make Ethan’s sexuality his defining characteristic, and his parents have no issue with it. If anything threatens the stability of Searcher’s relationship with his own son, it’s Avalonia’s pando crops. When the plants mysteriously begin to fail, the Clades set off on an expedition to discover why, ending up in a hidden, subterranean world. It’s there that the pressures to continue the family legacy begin to creep up in another generation of Clades.
In this underworld, the crew, which also includes Avalonia’s president, Callisto Mal (Lucy Liu), comes across fantastical creatures and landscapes, recalling everything from Dr. Seuss and Avatar to the films of Miyazaki Hayao, minus much of the specificity and meticulous detail that make the latter so memorable. The group also runs into the long-lost Jaeger, who, despite being stuck in this underworld for over two decades, has his own ideas about which direction this mission should go. What follows is a somewhat unwieldy Spielbergian adventure (right down to Henry Jackman’s John Williams-aping score) that’s laced with an environmentalist message and at once celebratory of tradition and people following their own passions.
Though Strange World never escapes an aura of familiarity, its grappling with the paternal battle between wanting to make your childrens’ lives easier and giving them the space they need to find themselves is eloquently rendered. It’s particularly effective in regard to Ethan coming to terms with his passions during the expedition. It’s a journey of self-discovery that wouldn’t have been half as effective if his closeness to and love for his father weren’t so strongly established.
But while Strange World’s examination of generational tension is tender and inspiring, as well as nicely tied to its theme of the necessity of adapting to changing times, the film’s sci-fi elements and environmental message are more half-baked in their execution. The late-film revelation that takes its cues from an old Iroquois creation myth, in particular, is less mind-blowing than bizarre—a left turn that’s never sufficiently addressed by the characters for the remainder of Strange World. Like the seemingly incomplete creatures in the underworld, you could say that the film’s frustratingly unfocused script could’ve used another pass.
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