102 min | PG | November 23, 2022 | Walt Disney Pictures
Searcher Clade wants to be a quiet farmer. His missing father was a legendary explorer, and now a dying crop drags the whole family into a living world beneath their feet. The world is more imaginative than anything the family does inside it.
Searcher Clade is a farmer who once helped discover a miracle plant called Pando that powers his civilization. That plant is dying, and the cure lies in a subterranean realm of pulsing organs, acid seas, and ambulatory creatures. Searcher descends with his wife, his son, and eventually the swaggering father he abandoned decades ago. The film stages a three-generation argument about legacy, fatherhood, and what we owe the land we exploit. Strange World wants to be an ecological fable wrapped in a pulp serial, and it commits to the wrapper more than the fable.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays Searcher as a man who fears becoming his father and ends up repeating the same mistakes on his own son. He keeps his voice careful and reasonable, which makes his stubbornness sting. Dennis Quaid plays Jaeger Clade as a fossil of frontier machismo, loud and oblivious and certain that conquest is the only adventure worth having. Jaboukie Young-White gives Ethan a softness the men around him lack, and his crush on a boy named Diazo is handled as ordinary teenage nerves rather than a lesson. Gabrielle Union and Lucy Liu fill out Meridian and Callisto Mal with brisk competence the script never bothers to deepen.
Don Hall directs from a screenplay by Qui Nguyen, and the visual invention outpaces the storytelling at every turn. The underworld glows in candy reds and electric blues, and the production design treats the environment as a single breathing organism rather than a backdrop. The film borrows its frame from 1930s adventure pulps, complete with a clipped narrator voiced by Alan Tudyk and chapter-style title cards. That conceit is the boldest formal choice on offer, and the script abandons its momentum whenever the family stops to relitigate the same grievance. The world keeps revealing new wonders while the people inside it keep saying the same things.
Strange World hides a clever idea inside its third act, and the reveal recontextualizes the entire journey into a statement about sustainability and self-destruction. The trouble is that the characters arrive at the twist faster than the audience can care about them. Searcher and Jaeger and Ethan represent positions in a debate more than they live as people. The spectacle is genuine and the message is sincere, and neither one finds a story big enough to hold it. The result is a beautiful expedition into a hollow middle.