Finding Dory was the first movie I’ve seen in over a month. I guess that’s not that surprising when I haven’t really even had time to relax, but still. The latest movie review I did was on John Wick, which was in August. Let’s get to it.

Now, an interesting thing I’m realizing as I write this is that I haven’t heard anything about this movie. It’s been out for two months and I only assume that people liked it simply because it hasn’t been subject in any conversation I’ve been a part of.

As far as movie sequels that didn’t need to happen go, I’d say it wasn’t bad. The plot is sort of obvious (I mean, come on), but since it took place in an aquarium(ish) it had an interesting feel to it. We’re not traveling across the ocean this time. There are different obstacles involved here. Mostly walls and traveling outside of the water.

This movie had a lot more charm than I was expecting. I liked the majority of the new characters, and as was to be expected, it was pretty funny. I think that’s where most of my entertainment came from. I liked certain characters because they were funny, so I knew how much I would like a scene based on which characters were prevalent.

It did, of course, have its flaws. I had two big issues with the movie. The first was that in order to make things more dramatic, things happened a lot when communication would have made things go a lot more smoothly. It’s frustrating when a character goes off and does something just to cause tension and character conflict, and that happens a lot. There isn’t a whole lot of sitting there “relaxing” in this movie, because the tension never really lets up, making it a little exhausting. Along with this is sort of a side track. I’d say the last twenty percent of the movie didn’t really need to happen. (Of course, the climax and stuff would have had to shift around to compensate for a shorter movie. My point is that it could have been done.) There are a lot of unnecessary conflicts that occur just to make all the pieces fall perfectly into place, which leads me to my second point.

My second issue is that it’s unrealistically predictable. Yes, I get that this movie is for kids. I’m not saying it’s unrealistic. (Well…) I’m just saying that the movie ends exactly as you would expect and it prioritizes that ending over realism. This movie did have a lot of surprisingly accurate depictions of things, sure, but only when the plot didn’t require otherwise.

“Hm. We need this character to go from A to B to encounter this new conflict.”

“Well, in the real world there is no way for that to happen. Aquariums are sort of designed so that fishes in Place A can’t get to Place B.”

“Well, it needs to happen.”

“Alright, fine.”

Again, kids movie. I get that. But that doesn’t invalidate the issue. I’d say huge studios like Pixar should be able to go the extra mile to put even more realism into these things. Heck, even if the movie was realistic, if it doesn’t feel realistic, there’s still a problem there.

Overall, like I said, it wasn’t bad. I liked a lot of the new characters. In fact I’d say I liked virtually all of the new characters more than Marlin, Nemo, and Dory. They’re actually pretty flat in this movie, which is disappointing but not surprising.