The fantastical world of dreams proves to be predictably fertile territory for an extravagant adventure for kids in Netflix’s big-budget big bet Slumberland, an imaginative and mostly agreeable adaptation of an early 20th-century comic strip centered around the character of Little Nemo. Created by cartoonist Winsor McCay, Nemo would find himself visiting bold and surreal new worlds in his sleep and here we meet him as a her, newcomer Marlow Barkley, living in a lighthouse on a remote island with her father, played by Kyle Chandler.
It’s an eye-grabbing location, the first of many, and early on it’s clear we are in the often tight-fisted streamer’s lofty A class, the film carrying a rare $150m budget. Director Francis Lawrence, best known for commandeering the majority of the Hunger Games series, is a canny and confident tour guide, ushering us from one strange set-piece to the next as Nemo follows in her dream-travelling father’s footsteps after his death. She’s forced to live with her estranged uncle (Chris O’Dowd) and forced out of her untenable family home. In her dreams she meets Flip (Jason Momoa), someone her father used to travel with in his sleep, and he tells her of a myth, a pearl that would allow her to control her dreams, and the two embark on a quest to find it.
The rambunctious quest involves drifting through the dreams of others, a dangerous gambit as while dying in one’s own dream bears no impact on reality, dying in someone else’s leads to real world fatality. In the breathless, and often exhausting, first act we’re fed a great many of these rules, an ungainly exposition dump so overloaded that we feel as if we should be taking notes. But once we’re fully immersed and some air is allowed to circulate, there’s spirited fun to be had as we glide along with the pair. With so much money to play with, Lawrence treats us to an inventive digital buffet of expensive oddities, from a salsa dance made up of butterflies to a city of glass skyscrapers.
Momoa’s ebulliently full-tilt performance clearly aims to ape the all-cylinders shtick that Johnny Depp introduced in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise before watering it down in other, lesser projects. It’s thankfully not as grating as that ultimately became but it’s also not as effective as that once was, Momoa proving to be game if not entirely well-suited to such extreme pantomime.
Like so many films of this scale, Slumberland falls victim to the inevitable third act bloat, the runtime inexcusably clocking in at almost two hours, making some of the jeopardy feel less involving than it should, our focus less on the characters and more on our watches. The equally inevitable life lessons are specific and sweet-natured enough, especially those that come from a surprisingly moving midway twist, the story shifting to focus on a different and less obvious kind of loss.
Given the hefty budget and easily replicated formula, Slumberland is clearly envisioned as the streamer’s latest franchise-starter and, mercifully devoid of the winking smugness that drowns so many other kids’ movies, there are certainly worse prospects.
Slumberland is out in select cinemas now and will be available on Netflix on 18 November
