Slumberland movie review & film summary (2022)
This would not prove to be the only attempt to bring the adventures of Little Nemo to the big screen. In 1984, there was an expensive European version entitled “Dream One” that was co-produced by John Boorman, featured a cast that included the likes of Harvey Keitel, Nipsey Russell, Carole Bouquet, and Michel Blanc, and was, by most accounts, somewhat of a disaster. A few years later, the Japanese-American animated co-production “Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland” came out and was also a failure, though it was at least an occasionally interesting one. Frankly, the one film that has come the closest to capturing McCay’s blend of strikingly hallucinatory imagery and ambitious storytelling to date is the Terry Gilliam classic “Time Bandits,” right down to McCay’s willingness to deal with darker themes within his wild narratives.
A new cinematic take on McCay’s creation has now arrived in the form of Francis Lawrence's “Slumberland” and while it's a film few will actually like, your reasons for disliking it will presumably vary with your knowledge of the source material. If you're familiar with McCay and his place in comics history, the film is a profound betrayal of his work that takes a startlingly unique creation and renders it into the kind of utterly forgettable sludge. Those who have never heard of the likes of Nemo or McCay will instead look at it as just another bland fantasy epic that spends tens of millions of dollars but somehow fails to come up with a single memorable image in return.
This time around, Nemo (Marlow Barkley) is a nine-year-old girl living in an isolated lighthouse with her father (Kyle Chandler), who regales her nightly with elaborate bedtime stories involving fabulous treasures, dangerous creatures, and his faithful companion, a rogue known as Flip. When her father dies at sea, Nemo is sent to live with his estranged brother, Philip (Chris O’Dowd), a city-dwelling dullard who sells doorknobs for a living and has no idea of how to communicate with any child, let alone a grieving one.
