Where I Watched it: Disney plus
English Audio Description?: Yes
Last year,I stumbled upon a random straight-to-video Disney Plus release with Better Nate Than Never that wound up being one of the best of almost 300 films I saw in 2022. There is a chance that Crater, which really took me by surprise, will be that film this year.
I’ve already participated in spirited online debates defending this film, which hails from the director of The Stanford Prison Experiment (shocking, I know). Apparently, the trailers (which I don’t really ever watch anymore), showed a happy movie. Crater is not happy. It’s a coming of age, most memorable summer of our lives, type film. It’s like if Stand By Me, The Sandlot, and The Goonies had a baby in space. One argument was that the kids felt too much like the Stranger Things kids, because one of them talks like Dustin. Dustin is just a stand in for The Goonies.
Sure, you can write off all films with a makeup that contains a bunch of boys and that token girl, but you’d be writing off a lot of movies. Here, the film takes place in the distant future, where we’ve moved to another planet, but we mine on the moon, and there’s a mining colony set up there.
Basically, poor people who can’t pay to get to the new planet sign a contract that says they’ll mine for 20 years, then they can take their family with them to the new planet. of course, this contract is pretty damn impossible to achieve or get out of, bordering on slavery, or at least endentured servitude, with time not completed being passed on to the next generation.
Somehow, our main boy has a father who worked off his contract,and then died. But the boy still gets to go to the new planet. problem is, he’ll have to go in cryo sleep for 75 years, and when he wakes up, all the friends he left behind will probably be dead. Again, it’s not a fun movie. It’s actually a lot like Wall-E, up, or inside out, in that while it has some charming moments, there’s something hanging over this film the whole time.
So, he wants to honor his father’s last request, and go see this crater where his dad and his also deceased mom used to sneak out and go to back in the day. He gathers his friends, each one of them with an equally depressing story, and they head out to the crater on a rover. Along the way, they have some fun, and face some danger.
It’s really a thought provoking movie that has something to say about the potential of being in a future where you work the whole time for a future you never get to see yourself. Where companies literally can own you. Where the lower class can be reduced to a tube in the end. In one scene, the kids come upon a place with some really old food rations, and they don’t even know conceptually what ice cream even is. They talk about how in school, all they learn about is mining. When they see holograms of earth, it’s the first time they’ve ever seen anything like it. One of them even asked the newest addition to the group, the girl, who just arrived from Earth, if it was true that the sky is blue.
But that’s what I love about crater. it’s not just some mindless Disney film off an assembly line that is silly, goofy, and meant to make your tweens giggle. Crater actually has characters with real problems, and has a backstory that might make your kids more empathetic and likely to ask questions. It also does not go for the cheesy, happy ending that would not have fit this narrative. it goes for the harsh reality promised. And when we reach that point, both the good and the bad of that choice resonate profoundly.
Considering how much crap Pixar has made, I would have loved for someone at Pixar to have seen this script and gone for it. it has more brains and heart than Lightyear, and given to a director like Andrew Stanton could have broken your heart. As it is, it’s still a damn good movie, just one that most critics won’t take seriously, and will quickly be forgotten as “just another Disney title”, when it deserved so much more.
The audio description for the most part focused on the science fiction of the moments, and in one scene even tried to figure out how to describe what seemed like a horror movie moment, before revealing what really was happening. Sometimes, the timing in these scenes reveals the twist too early. I’ve seen one too many films that told me about a jump scare three seconds before the music signals it actually happening.
I do recommend this, and I hope to watch this again. I might stand on my island alone here, but I think punishing a film everyone worked hard on because Disney cut a trailer that made it look like cotton candy fluff is just plain wrong.
Final Grade: A