When the series was being produced, DC’s top people-and I mean top people-spoke enthusiastically about it being a perennial favorite, kept perpetually in print a la Watchmen with additional spinoff titles and even merchandising. I took on the series for two major reasons: First, The Atlantis Chronicles remains, all these years later, some of my favorite work. To a great degree, I look upon my time writing Aquaman as a spectacularly ambitious failure. Slumberland is available to watch now on Netflix.Originally published September 21, 2001, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1453

It's a diverting enough watch due to the efforts of the cast, assuming you stay awake during the action. With Chris O'Dowd's well-meaning yet dull uncle Phillip (a doorknob salesman which creates juvenile, but funny, jokes), the movie even has something to say about being a foster parent.īut as much as the emotional core might work, Slumberland is let down by the fact that as a fantasy, there's nothing fantastical about the majority of it. Slumberland might be aimed more at younger audiences, but anybody watching who's lost a parent will shed a tear. It might almost be a cheat to cast Kyle Chandler as another earnest father (see Super 8, for instance), but his scenes with Barkley are affecting all the same and tie the themes of the movie together nicely. Jason Momoa gamely throws himself into Flip's swagger, as well as building a believable connection with Nemo as they go from reluctant allies to genuine friends, while newcomer Marlow Barkley holds her own against her A-list co-star.įor all the disappointment of the world and the set pieces, the movie does have a strong emotional core. Slumberland's flaws are no fault of the cast though. You could just not think about it too much and enjoy the ride, but the ride is so lacklustre that your mind will be drawn to the inconsistencies. It doesn't help that despite all the efforts to craft its own world logics, that the movie sometimes breaks its own rules. Yet she never feels truly in danger in the obviously fake surroundings, chased by a Lost-esque shadow monster, so Slumberland never truly thrills. We're told – in one of several exposition dumps – that if Nemo dies in another person's dream, she dies for real, to inject some peril. The movie revisits the same dreams and while there's a story reason for that, it's disappointing: being set in an endless world of dreams should be more imaginative. We do get set pieces in various dreams that have some visual flourishes, like dancers made up of butterflies, but every setting is drowned in sub-par digital effects. Because the problem with Slumberland is that it ends up spending so much time explaining its unique world that it forgets to have fun in it. The setup promises an entertaining family spin on Inception, but it ends up being only slightly less convoluted than the Christopher Nolan hit.

Aquaman by peter david