‘Dreamland’: a failed family adventure

Four years after directing the spy thriller ‘Red Sparrow’, Francis Lawrence returns to family cinema with ‘The Land of Dreams’, with which he dares to adapt Winston McCay’s famous comic again, this time for the small screen, ‘Little Nemo’, with a modern retelling titled ‘Land of Dreams’. A tape where it looks like that Jason Momoa tries to capture the quirky and irreverent spirit of Johnny Depp with a character more designed for the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ actor than for him.

Technically, Lawrence has experience in juvenile sagas designed for family cinema, the last four features of ‘The Hunger Games’ attest to this. However, dealing with McCoy’s work is a greater challenge, especially since it is a comic also published in the early 1900s and considered the first great classic of comics. It’s more, There have been several attempts to turn Nemo into a cinematic adventure, the last one, titled ‘Little Nemo’, was in 1989, a co-production between Japan and the United States that was being spearheaded by part of the Studio Ghibli team. (Five years earlier they made a test short which did not convince the North American producers) and which is currently considered a cult film, despite being a commercial failure in its original release.

Given the precedents, a real-image version was produced in 1984 which also flopped, it was time to see with some skepticism whether Lawrence would be able to adapt McCoy’s work. It is the truth, his proposal takes away almost all the magic and sense of adventure that both the 1989 anime adaptation and the original McCoy comic had. Beyond the purely aesthetic changes, such as turning Nemo into a girl and giving Flip a more stylized form, Jason Momoa’s body has invited them to do it, the truth is that he is facing aa failed production that fails to interpret the steampunk spirit of the original work and that transforms what could have been an incredible epic journey through daydreams into a familiar attempt to reproduce ‘Origin’with a dramatic backdrop with which it tries to be sort of a darker version of ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ or ‘A Bridge to Terabithia’.

A failed family adventure that falls short of its source material

Lawrence, directing from a screenplay by David Guion and Michael Handelman, makes dreams vary, dividing the story into a real world and a dream world. This removes any possibility of epic sense to a story that is interrupted, as for files. Added to this are some special effects that are too noticeable when Nemo enters Dreamland, noting in some sequences that he is faced with a chroma. This execution of breaking the dream and continuing it afterward means that not even the performances attract attention, despite having two supporting stars in Chris O’Dowd or Kyle Chandler. Jason Momoa as an eccentric faun (or satyr) convinces little or nothing. As mentioned earlier, he was a character who seemed to have been written more in the style of Johnny Depp than that of an ‘Aquaman’ actor, who lacks the spark and sense of the absurd.

Since its premiere is on Netflix and exclusive to the platform, ‘El País de los Sueños’ gets rid of the public figures of an inclement box office, which benefits it beyond the numbers, as it seems like a low-budget production (although cost 150 million dollars), with a weak script and little intention of providing entertainment that allows you to see yourself doing anything else. Without a doubt, Lawrence seems to be no match for McCoy’s cartoon.

Note: 4

The best: It has a promising start, a pity that it remains only to that.

Worse: The decision to turn an epic adventure into a serialized dream world, which turns the story into something boring.