The long awaited Incredibles 2

analysis
#41

I don’t think the Consequence is exactly Conceiving though. What Evelyn wants is for supers to be permanently disgraced, and she wants ordinary people to take care of themselves as she feels her parents should have done. To me the Conceiving feels like a step she has a to take to get to that.

I just saw the movie a couple of hours ago, and after reading this thread and thinking about everything for a couple hours, my current pet theory is this:

OS: Psychology: Being/ Playing a Role

I think this might be a situation where the “new” terminology works well. Helen has assumed the role of superhero, even though she was the one least interested in pursuing that lifestyle. Bob is being the caregiver to the kids even though he feels like being the provider is his job. Evelyn is secretly Screenslaver. The pizza delivery guy has been forced to play the role of Screenslaver by Evelyn.

Helen: Mind: Impulsive Responses/ Preconscious

Helen’s impulsive response is to take care of or fear for the family/ the kids. During the phone call with Bob, she jumps out bed, ready to run home at the merest hint of trouble, and Bob has to talk her down. Again during the climax, when it’s suggested she go after the plane, Helen instantly reaches for the kids, saying she shouldn’t leave them, until everyone convinces her it’s for the best.

Helen appears to have some issues with Worth in particular. There’s a couple of times when she responds with an appreciative look to Evelyn for recognizing her strengths, and she’s defensive in response to Bob’s attitude when she gets the job, insisting “Oh, I know I’ll be great,” and she gets defensive again later when Evelyn suggests she had been in Mr. Incredible’s shadow in the old days.

During the climax it is shown that the kids, even baby Jack Jack, can take care of themselves, and Helen shows absolutely no angst at the prospect of them all going after a group violent criminals together. She appears to have Changed.

Bob: Situation: Progress/ How Things Are Changing

Bob is not a progressive guy. He just assumes he’ll be the face of Winston’s pro-super campaign and is a bit annoyed that Helen will be in the spotlight. He complains “They keep changing math.” Jack Jack’s unpredictable and constantly changing powers prevent Bob from sleeping. The Incredibile goes from wrecked beyond hope of repair to being owned by some rich guy.

Bob grows into his role as caretaker and out of his resentment toward Helen, but what he wanted is to fight crime as a family, and at the end he gets what he wants. Bob appears to be Staeadfast.

RS: Activity: Doing

This is harder, and the RS is the hardest for me anyway, and I’m not sure it’s very well developed here in any case. Conflict here seems to revolve around “What should we do?” How should the kids be raised? Should we encourage them to be superheroes, or should they obey the law no matter what?

Helen and Bob are both doing a lot of stuff, and they’re each doing the stuff that has previously been the other’s job. It’s hard to pick out good RS moments throughout the story. It actually appears to be on total hiatus during the third quarter, when Helen is tracking down Screenslaver and Bob is dealing with Jack Jack’s powers.

Writing it all out, I’m starting to think I might have the RS and OS Domains flipped, but it’s getting way too late to think much more about it.

#42

Hey guys, I finally saw this last night with the family!

I felt like it was very close to having a complete storyform, with the problem being a mostly-missing throughline – the Relationship Story. I think this is why it felt kind of off, but still has a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Anyway, I had no problem seeing Helen / Elasticgirl as the Change character. I agree with Bob / Mr. Incredible as the MC, though it took me a bit to decide (I sometimes get thrown off when the movie shows things from someone else’s direct point of view, like they did with Elasticgirl when the goggles first go over her eyes).

I agree with the domains & concerns as many others in this thread had them, starting with @Lakis, e.g. OS Psychology/Being, MC Situation/Progress, IC Mind/Preconscious. (RS Physics/Doing is there, but barely.)

Furthermore, I think the OS Problem Element of Trust is pretty clear. Everyone trusts the Antagonist sister (can’t remember her name) when they shouldn’t; the Antagonist is driven by people placing too much trust in supers (including her father which led to his death); most of the good-guys are driven to get people to trust supers again, etc. This makes the OS Issue Desire, which is also perfect (they all want something better for the world and themselves, though they may disagree on what that better is).

As Change IC, this makes Helen’s IC Problem also Trust, again a perfect fit as she has so much trouble trusting that her family can be okay without her, and in the beginning places her trust in the law. The IC Issue of Worry is pretty obvious in the phone calls with Bob.

Meanwhile MC Bob feels threatened by Helen being the new #1 super in the family (OS Issue Threat) and by all the crazy things popping up with the kids – dating, math homework, baby powers. His MC Problem of Theory is really clear in that speech he gives: “I’m Mr. Incredible so I have to be an incredible dad, I have to handle anything.” And though he’s challenged he does stick with this outlook, so Steadfast.

However, the RS was almost non-existent. There was some okay stuff in the beginning when they argued about parenting. And I think in the middle they tried to have a proxy RS between Bob and Vi, a father-daughter relationship that was still challenged by the physics of parenting. The short-costume-maker character who took Jack-Jack for a night seemed to make one comment on the RS Problem of Accurate: “parenting must be done properly”. But that was about it, the RS wasn’t really a “story” that had some kind of resolution. And so the movie lacked the heart of the first one.

I haven’t dug too far into Symptom/Responses but they feel right. e.g. everyone focuses on making Determinations about Screenslaver, but then end up responding by playing right into her hands (Expectation). While Bob is always responding by trying to do what’s expected of him as a parent.

The OS Solution of Test is pretty clear though, with trying out the Incredicar, the kids finally getting their try to save the day, testing out Jack-Jacks’ powers, and trying to turn the out-of-control ship – all of these were pretty clear illustrations of the solution that was effective in resolving things. And as @Lakis pointed out earlier, Helen being okay with the kids trying out their powers and testing themselves against criminals and other supers, shows that IC Change.

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#43

Great to see you jump in on this one @mlucas!

The way you describe it seems really strong to me.

This Element is always a bit tricky for me to understand but as soon as you mentioned this I thought of how what I think @jhull has described as kind of “appropriateness” or “acceptability” (e.g. Lego Batman’s Problem of “non-accurate”). So it seems to me that there might be something in there about Bob and Helen’s “appropriate” roles in the family – Bob thinks he should be the super-leader and Helen is worried about being a good mom, and now their roles are reversed. The solution is to accept the “non-accurate” reversal of traditional gender roles.

Doesn’t the question of appropriateness come up here too, e.g. when is it appropriate to use your powers?

This brings up another question: we always think of the RS as between two people but is it possible to think of it as a whole family? From that perspective the whole family unit/relationship has problems with what’s “tolerable”. It’s meant to be funny, but even the way Jack Jack’s powers are manifesting seems to be causing problems because it’s not really tolerable to have a baby who explodes with fire or whatever every time he has a temper tantrum.

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#44

Wow! I really like your descriptions of the family RS and how that would work with an RS Problem of Accurate. And believe it or not, I had been thinking along those lines too (could the family relationship itself work as the RS, rather than just a relationship strictly between two people). Couldn’t think of a good way to express it, so kudos.

Hmm. I definitely see how the family could have gone from Accurate to Non-Accurate to resolve “our” difficulties. The last scene with dumping Vi’s boyfriend at the theatre so they can all go off to fight crime together really shows that Solution of Non-Accurate.

But how would you explain the feeling of something missing in the story then? Or did you not feel that way? I still think it didn’t have quite the same “heart” as the original, but I like that Jack-Jack and Vi would be included in this interpretation of the RS because all the heart in this one seemed to come from them.

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#45

Yeah, I don’t know. I do remember being very surprised by how much I liked it because sequels usually aren’t that good but I did feel like it was kind of treading the same ground as the original. I started second-guessing myself after this thread though as several people seemed to think something was missing.

You might still be right that there wasn’t enough there in the RS or it wasn’t quite connected enough – the stuff with the kids almost felt like subplot. Maybe the signal would have come through more clearly if more RS were illustrated as moments between Bob and Helen?

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#46

Caught the first half on a plane ride. I can’t speak to the whole storyform, but I can say what was off from the get-go: the sequel hand-waves / retcons the first film.

First there’s Helen disregarding any lessons learned, “That was on the island.”

Second, at the end of the first film the family confidently dons their masks, ready to battle the Underminer (even Jack-Jack is ready to go, implying the family knows and understands his powers). But in the sequel’s version of the same event, the family is now apprehensive about entering the fray, and they don’t know a thing about Jack-Jack until the raccoon.

This nails it on the head. From what I saw, Incredibles 2 is a strange ersatz deja vu of the original. It re-litigates settled issues and hopes we won’t notice.

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#47

It’s been a while since I’ve seen the film, but I may have an idea why the film felt strange, yet garnered such a positive critical response.

It’s rare but not unheard of for the players in the RS to consist of those that don’t represent the perspective of the IC (and maybe even the MC). In the Jungle Book (2016), Bagheera fulfills most of the IC throughline while the dysfunctional relationship between Mowgli and Baloo fulfills most of the RS throughline. In the Users Group Podcast for the film, Chris Huntley touches on the above idea of having seperate players between the IC and RS throughlines. He mentions that while it’s perfectly fine structurally, it may feel odd to the audience.

Perhaps this is what’s going on in the Incredibles 2. Helen fulfilling the IC throughline, and Violet/Jack-Jack’s relationship with Bob fulfilling the RS.

Source: http://dramatica.com/audio/users-group-podcast/the-jungle-book

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#48

This is great. I didn’t realize Chris said it might make the film feel “odd” but that would totally explain it!

The one refinement I would make to your statement – something which @Lakis expressed earlier – is to just think of the RS as “the family relationship” rather than between any particular players. Something like this (10 lines between 5 family members):

But even that doesn’t really cover it because it’s only showing the 1-1 relationships. The family relationship is more of a big blob existing between all of them.

Note: separate from the odd RS are the points @LunarDynasty mentioned earlier, that all the lessons and resolutions from the first film just disappeared. This is definitely a huge issue, and would explain another aspect of the “bad taste” this movie might have left.

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#49

This is really interesting. I was trying to articulate something like this as a question in the Subtext user meeting yesterday.

From a technical perspective, being able to do this gives you a lot more storytelling flexibility. If you have the IC (Helen) off doing superhero stuff, how do you encode that crucial relationship moment without getting them back together in an artificial way? Part of the answer is to have the “family” stand in for the RS.

However if it creates a weird feeling/audience reception that might be a downside.

I suspect this is actually the biggest thing. I hadn’t seen the original in such a long time that it wasn’t front of mind when I saw this one. But I think if you watched them back to back, it would be annoying.

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#50

I think the first Incredibles managed this rather well, as there was tug and pull between various members of the family all throughout – so even when the primary MC/IC pair of Bob and Helen (husband and wife) were off-screen, Dash and Violet carried weight for the heart of the story.

I’m actually trying this with a new story of mine, where the main subjective characters are a brother and his step-sister but the RS is the entire blended family.

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#51

Saw it again today. I might have changed my mind on where throughlines potentially lay but still having trouble seeing MC as external or OS as internal. Also, I saw a subtle moment that looked like a change for Bob. The whole movie is about how difficult it is for him to let Helen be the one hero-ing, but when it’s time to go after Evelyn, she says something to Bob and looks at him and he’s like “well, aren’t you going after her?” Where he normally would have been itching to jump into action, he’s finally accepting that Helen is the one that needs to stop the villain.

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#52

I haven’t seen the first one in years and it took me several minutes of confusion to realize we were picking up immediately at the end of the first story. I’m not sure I like that choice given the huge real world gap in time between the two. Then again, most superhero universes have a, uh, creative relationship with time.

Anyway, what you say is definitely true, but I’m not sure it can be held against the story in Dramatica terms.

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#53

That was one of my two certainties, also. But it’s more than just Bob. The whole family change at the end, except for Helen. The whole way through the movie, Bob/Dash/Violet are desperate to get into the action and do something. But by the end, they’re supporting Helen to do what she has to do.

I happened to see this video about forgettable movies yesterday (not sure I totally buy the argument sold, though) and there’s a moment around 5:45 or so where they share that a number of people named Incredibles 2 as an ‘extremely forgettable’ movie.

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#54

I don’t think i entirely buy the argument either. For one, i couldn’t tell you anything about cinematography, but I couldn’t tell the difference between the movie he was praising and the other ones. and two, though he had forgotten about A Quiet Place, he specifically references how others spoke about it for months. So he’s really only addressing his own tastes there.

As far as Incredibles 2, I wouldn’t call it forgettable on it’s own. But in the shadow of its predecessor, perhaps it is more so.

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#55

Just being a devil’s advocate here.

I think the overall question of the movie is whether or not it’s okay to embrace your super-ness when it’s being rejected by society. This what made it feel like a rehash of #1. Anyway on this question, it seems to me that Bob is resolutely steadfast in his answer - yes. Helen changes – reluctantly at first, but definitively by the end.

The question of whether or not Bob should be the primary hero I think happens in the RS, which encompasses both Helen and Bob and the family. It’s not stated explicitly, but the real issue is what’s appropriate (accurate) – shouldn’t the dad be the one going out and fighting bad guys while mom stays home and takes care of the kids? Bob’s acceptance of the “inappropriate” role-reversal represents growth in the RS, not change in resolve.

As a theme it’s a little anachronistic but so’s the movie with its 50s/60s retro-futurist vibe.

What do you think?

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#56

I’ll have to think about the rest of your comment a bit first (have to get this pesky day job off my plate!) but I think I’m seeing this movie in a little different light than everyone else because I don’t see it as a rehash at all. I think of the first one as being more about the family learning how to work together, as supers or as a family. The second one seems to be saying ‘we’ve figured that out, now lets get society at large on board.’

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#57

That’s how I read it, too. My immediate feeling when leaving the theatre was that there were two incomplete storyforms mashed together: the family stuff (Bob/Dash/Violet trying to fit in ‘normal’ life) and the screenslaver stuff (trying to conceive of the supers in a new way/crazy supervillain tries to plant ideas in peoples minds).

The home/family stuff is what feels like (or feels like a rehash of) the first movie, and the screenslaver stuff feels like a whole new thing. But it felt pretty jarring to me to go from one to the next. They don’t feel like the same story at all.

Structurally, this is quite a mess.

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#58

Yeah but isn’t the whole problem (the problem that concerns everyone) in the first movie the fact that society has decided that no one is allowed to be supers anymore? (In the official Dramatica anlaysis labels the OS throughline as “Suppression of the Supers”). And all the stuff about learning to work together as a family – doesn’t that seem like an RS throughline of Physics (Learning, Understanding, Doing and Obtaining)?

I’m trying to remember how the first one ends vis-a-vis society’s response.

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#59

It’s all worded that way for the story, but I’d say that the actual problem—and I could be super wrong here—is that the OS problem is largely treated as the suppression of Bob and Dash. Lucius is fine being suppressed. All the conflict that everyone feels is mostly coming from Bob wanting to be a hero again. Doesn’t create conflict through Helen or Lucius. There are maybe a few scenes where where suppressing supers creates conflict through Dash and Violet. But point is, the first movie isn’t really about society suppressing the supers, but dealing with Bob and Dash being suppressed.

The first one ends with a few civilians being excited at the idea that the supers are back when Syndrome makes his debut, but that only lasts a few seconds. Then the Parr’s are at the track meet cheering on Dash as they-as a family-encourage him to come in second so that he can fit in with society’s expectations. So the first one never convinces society at large to stop suppressing them.

And yet the storyform shows that it’s a success. I’m thinking the goal, in regards to not being suppressed, is really in reference to Bob and family. So even though there is wider suppression in the world of the story, I’m thinking the story is structurally looking at just the parr’s. Just my thoughts.

I can see where your coming from, but just don’t feel the same, I guess. It felt like a natural progression to me. We start out with the whole family being ‘normal’. Then they learn that it’s good to be supers to solve the problem. Rather than relearning that it’s okay to be super in the second one, it’s like the second one is saying ‘lesson 1 was that it’s okay to be super. But now lesson 2 is that you play to your strengths. Just because super strength worked last time doesn’t mean it will this time.’ Or maybe it’s saying something like ‘it’s still okay to be super, but don’t get in the way. Don’t let being super work against you’

#60

Rehash wasn’t really the word I wanted to use, and I think I probably gave the wrong impression. I didn’t mean that those scenes are just mirroring the first movie or are pushing for the same narrative argument, but they’re dealing with the same kind of broad ideas in a Dramatica sense: they’re both ‘Expectation’ stories (to quote the Contextual Subgenres which are so heavily on my mind at the minute). Both of those stories – the suppression of the supers and the stay-at-home family – are about having to live up to a certain ‘societal’ ideal: they’re forced to behave in a non-super manner.

While they’re certainly different on a storytelling level, those particular threads are very similar on a thematic level, at least.

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