Wonder Park

This week: Wonderland.

Again, I don’t care what the actual title is, it’s Wonder Land.  That’s the name of the park.  If you wanted to call your park Wonderland, then you damn well had better get the rights to call your movie Wonderland.  Or go with the original planned title of “Amusement Park.”  Going with Wonder Park too much of a near miss.  You’re half right, and half wrong, which makes it just grating on the nerves.

And apparently the Studio realized this too considering the changes they made to the second trailer.  In the first trailer, the characters all referenced Wonderland, and then the title popped up Wonder Park.  In the second trailer they changed it so all the characters call it Wonder Park, but in the movie they stuck with Wonderland, because it is easier to briefly alter dialogue in a trailer than to alter ALL THE ANIMATION including the name of the park.

Admittedly this is more of a problem with the trailers and the first and last 5 minutes of the movie, because you forget the title of the movie for the majority of the film.

This movie is about halfway to being a REALLY good movie.  Like on the same level as UP.  Unfortunately I can’t really talk about it without giving away spoilers so. . .

Basic plot, the main character is June who along with her mother create an . . .imaginary(?) theme park named Wonderland complete with talking animals as the park staff.  June is obsessed with creating Wonderland, so much to the point that she ends up building a model of wonderland that goes through her entire house.  Then her mother gets sick and June stops playing with Wonderland.  They put June’s mother on a bus and she disappears for most of the film to find the cure. June then wanders away from Math Camp and ends up in Wonderland, which has turned to hell because she stopped caring.  And because Wonderland exists in the MCU and was victim of the snap.  So June has to learn to care again to stop the sky portal of Darkness.

It’s very Neverending Story II meets Up.

From the trailers, you can tell something happens to get June to stop caring about Wonderland, and as you guess, the parent who cares most is going to die so that the kid stops believing in whatever they used to believe in and needs to learn to love again. And they pull the punch.

The mother gets sick with Timmy Thomas disease and has to go away. They have her suddenly coughing and getting short of breath, then becoming too weak to participate in Wonderland, then she visibly becomes gaunt before she is sent off. Then when she gets better, she comes back perfectly fine. So did this center she went to wait until she got her weight and energy back before returning her back to her family? Do out of state hospitals do that?

Another thing is that plot points don’t really develop, they just happen. June finds one of the missing park animals by accident. June is walking away from a wrecked ride and then suddenly just falls through random broken floor and ends up in zero gravity land, and then finds a house where the missing park animal is located. Just randomly by accident.

Where is the effort or journey for the character? What if in Wizard of Oz, instead of following the yellow brick road to the Emerald City, Dorothy accidentally tripped and rolled down a hill and suddenly found the Wizard running a produce stand?

Speaking of Wizard of Oz, there is no explanation for Wonderland. Is it another dimension? Cause June wanders into the woods, and then wanders out again. There is no, “It was a dream,” moment. She didn’t wake up at the end, she just walked out of the park, turned around and it was gone.

I would say that it deserves a watch, but wait for it to come out on Netflix or something. It is halfway there. It could have been so good, but I just don’t think it was quite organized correctly.

Next Week: The Unplanned Beach Dumbo. A stoner comedy about a flying elephant that. . . give me a moment, I need to find out what Unplanned is about, cause this is the first time hearing of it.

(Watches Trailer)

WHAT THE F-