Ninja Film Review: Reds (and Yellows, Blues, and Bombs)
Created | Updated Jun 12, 2016
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Reds (and Yellows, Blues, and Bombs)
The Angry Birds Movie
Countries: USA, Finland (filmed on location in Vancouver, Canada)
Directors: Clay Kaytis, Fergal Reilly
Rating: PG (seriously)
Starring: Jason Sudeikis, Josh Gad, Danny McBride
This film is also available in 3D. As one of the party lacks binocular vision, and the other two get seasick from midair visions of flying eggs and such, we opted for the more mundane 2D. It was perhaps for this reason that the three of us had the entire cinema to ourselves at 7.30 on a Thursday evening. We positioned ourselves dead centre for optimum appreciation and prepared to be dazzled by primary colours.
The plot: Red (Jason Sudeikis) is an Angry Bird. He acts out inappropriately in the happy bird community, even attacking a helpless lawn ornament (which, it must be said, is of grievous ugliness). As a result, Red is sent to anger management class, where he meets hyperactive Chuck (Josh Gad), nervously explosive Bomb (Danny McBride) and the gigantic red bird Terence (Sean Penn, in what will no doubt be an Oscar-nominated role). Together, they attempt to overcome their anger issues with the help of flower-child-gone-to-seed Matilda (Maya Rudolph). Things do not go well.
Happily for our attention spans, trouble arrives in the form of Green Pigs. Their leader Leonard (a bearded pig voiced by Bill Hader) promises peace, love, and mobility – for alas, these birds are all flightless. The pigs, on the other hand, are not: they fly. Boy, do they fly. With trampolines, biplanes, and catapults. (Note the catapult: it's not only visually stunning, it's a plot point.)
Of course, the Green Pigs turn out to have sinister intent. Red and his misfit bird group come to the rescue, with the reluctant help of Mighty Eagle (Peter Dinklage). There are parties, pyrotechnics, and piles of improbable things falling down and going boom. There are terrible wordplays ('Something's not kosher about those pigs' and 'Yeah, that'll happen when birds fly!'). In short, one chortles.
But there was a deeper meaning here. The Angry Birds Movie is, frankly, a revelation: a postmodern articulation of the adaptive value of urban angst. Alternatively, it can be read as a pre-apocalyptic vision of ecological disaster in the era of Global Warming, with the Green Pigs as the ultimate invasive species. Either way, we were sure the great Marxist philosopher from Ljubljana, the redoubtable Slavoj Zizek, would have a lot of wisdom for us that would apply. He did.
The liberal idea of tolerance is more and more a kind of intolerance. What it means is 'Leave me alone; don't harass me; I'm intolerant towards your over-proximity.'
Slavoj Zizek in The Guardian, 7 October 2005.
Red is a victim of liberal 'tolerance': his anger is unacceptable to his neighbours. As a result, he is subjected to harassment in the form of passive-aggressive 'reconditioning'. Fortunately for the other birds (and the plot), this fails to take. Red's role in [SPOILER ALERT] rescuing the eggs demonstrates the counterthesis that anger, rightly channeled, can be a useful tool.
What about animals slaughtered for our consumption? who among us would be able to continue eating pork chops after visiting a factory farm…?
Slavoj Zizek, Violence
One of the not-so-subtle messages delivered by this movie: eating eggs is wrong. (And not just bad for your cholesterol.)
…as soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency.
Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology
The fiction and illusion of Bird Island and Pig Island, the heroic (but dim) birds and the villainous (but equally dim) Green Pigs is a mirror of the reality in which the screenwriters, at least, seem to find themselves: a world which offers psychobabble solutions to existential quandaries. We do not blame them for falling back on cinematic cliché to resolve their issues. No, indeed. We laugh along with them, for they have in this way preserved the discursive-logical consistency of reality itself. They are our heroes, for…
Come on. I don't have any problem violating my own insights in practice.
Slavoj Zizek in The Guardian, 7 October 2005.
Which is why we love the Angry Birds.
PS The normal people in the group laughed their heads off at this delightfully silly movie. And even the Ninja Reviewer chuckled, especially at the poster that advertised 'Kevin Bacon in Hamlet'.
