There is a distant land, called Avalonia, surrounded by a formidable range of mountains that no one has ever been able to cross. Avalonia is dying, reduced as it is to stagnation and unable to grow, and many place their last hope of salvation beyond those mountains. So do the Clade, Jaeger and Searcher, father and son, a duo of explorers who have been desperately trying to find a ride to the other side for years. During an expedition, Searcher discovers a mysterious plant capable of generating electricity, and while Jaeger decides to continue alone in search of an access route, his son returns to the city bringing back the plant that will be the engine of rebirth of the entire Avalonia. After twenty-five years, that energy seems to be running out, and so it’s time to embark on a new adventure …
The new film by Oscar winner Don Hall is a limitless adventure that talks about us and our future, with a final surprise that gives it all meaning
“Amazing Stories”, Fritz Leiber, Robert E. Howard, “The Shadow”. And again, “Weird Tales”, Edgar Rice Burroughs, “Doc Savage”, H. Rider Haggard, “Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine” – it is a dark and bewitching well that in which the last of the Disney Classics drinks, the 61 ° to be exact: Strange World – A mysterious world, directed by Don Hall and produced by Roy Conlin (the duo behind Big Hero 6, box-office hit and Oscar in 2014), with the decisive writing of Qui Nguyen, is in fact a great and generous homage to the pulp magazines of the first decades of the twentieth century, those magazines printed on cheap paper – pulp – which agitated and mixed science fiction, mystery, adventure, detective stories, for cheap entertainment capable of weighing down the kids with excitement and to relieve adults of concern.
Direct descendants of British and nineteenth-century penny dreadfuls and dime novels, pulp magazines made the fortune of publishers and writers, in a context such as that of the Great Depression and the First World War that seemed to leave no room for levity and escape. Starting from here, and throwing Indiana Jones, King Kong, H.G. Wells and Journey to the Center of the Earth, Don Hall and Qui Nguyen have recreated a perfect distillation of that sense of wonder that jumped over you while reading those magazines and watching those films, and they did it in the most popular and contemporary way possible.
Strange World is a tale that lives and stirs of many things. It’s a family affair, with Jaeger’s thirst for adventure that is so blazing that it becomes overwhelming loneliness, and Searcher’s desire for emancipation that leads him to turn his back on everything and everyone; it is a generational saga, with the entry into the scene of Ethan, son of Searcher and nephew of Jaeger, a boy who is entering adult life but still so fragile and resolute at the same time; it is a social parable, with the fate of Avalonia poised between absolute isolation and the need for openness to the outside world.
It is, above all, a great narration which, even breaking into personal and collective stories, always gives us back a complex fresco, where the resolution of the private conflict is played out on the same field as the public one, because the future of the Clade family, their legacy and their heritage is that of all of Avalonia.