Early Man

Image credit: Amazon UK

Having grown up watching Wallace & Gromit on the ABC with my mum and dad, I have a particularly fond attraction to anything Aardman. “No cheese” was the soundtrack to my childhood and one of my favourite shirts of my dad’s was one from A Close Shave that stated ‘Gromit is innocent, he was framed’.

Tonight was a good a night as any to finally get around to watching Early Man, a film that I had meant to check out at the movies and never got around to. Honestly, I’m glad I waited until it popped up on Netflix.

The film tells the story of Dug (Eddie Redmayne) and his tribe of cavemen who live peacefully, if not mildly in a lush valley. Spending their days hunting rabbits and their nights dancing badly, Dug dreams of bigger things, but gets more than he bargained for when a group of Bronze Age invaders come to the valley to mine ore. In an attempt to save his tribe, Dug challenges the Bronze City’s undefeated football team to a match; if they win they keep their valley, if they lose they go down to work in the mines. It’s a perfect plan except for one hitch; none of them know how to play football.

Early Man is one of those movies made for sheer the fun of it. No doubt everyone had fun making this movie; from the animators, to the art department, to the writers, to the cast, and that sense of nostalgia and fun definitely bleeds into the movie, making you overlook the insane historic inaccuracies, the mediocre characters, and the lukewarm and predictable story.

Image credit: The Numbers

The teamwork narrative is one that never gets old and it’s proven time and time again to work in cinema: Cool Runnings, The Lego Movie, Pitch Perfect, Sister Act, the list goes on and on and on! While the story of Early Man is totally predictable, its sincerity and silliness prevents any allergic reactions of uncontrollable groans or bouts of eye-rolling. As I mentioned before, the characters are pretty mediocre; you don’t really form attachments to any of them, and while this doesn’t really help the story, it doesn’t totally dissuade it either.

The enjoyment of the movie is ultimately found in the sheer dumbness and silliness of the glaring historical inaccuracies (i.e. functioning taps in stone, the hog that makes dog noises, and the giant prehistoric monster duck). Because a fair portion of the film’s humour is so ridiculous and so stupid, you can’t help but giggle at it and you do find yourself just letting the details go because, at the end of the day, it’s a film about a soccer playoff between cavemen and men of the Bronze Age!

Director: Nick Park, 2018

Cast: Eddie Redmayne, Tom Hiddleston, Maisie Williams, Timothy Spall, Rob Brydon, Kavyan Novak, Johnny Vegas, Mark Williams, and Miriam Margoyles