
They will triumph eventually, somehow?
dirs: Nick Bruno & Troy Quane
2023
I have been on a bit of an animated kick lately, and seeing this was an absolutely utterly enjoyable blast.
I think it came out on streaming several months ago, and though I was curious, I held off because there were so many other important things to see, sometimes in black and white, with adult people doing important adult things like murder the indigenous or invent the atom bomb or conduct some orchestra and have sex with hot young guys.
So, with all that important homework / eat yer vegetables out of the way, it means I’m free to watch some enjoyable, actually enjoyable movies for a change.
I tell a lie. This too has been nominated for an Academy award, presumably in the Best Animated category, so I thought I’d watch it now before the stupid awards that don’t mean anything.
I shouldn’t have waited this long. I think my major beef against it was having heard it was significantly different story-wise from the graphic novel by ND Stephenson that it’s based on.
It is different, but it’s not to its detriment, which is not to say that it’s better than the book, but maybe just as good as the book. The main characters are pretty much the same, with the overall premise altered a lot to tell a similar but maybe a more 90 minute movie friendly story?
Unlike the other animated flick I saw recently which probably would have sunk without a trace had it been released in cinemas with a wide release, this here flick Nimona would probably also have sunk without trace, but it would have at least looked fantastic on the big screen. It’s superbly animated and belts along at a cracking pace. Nimona (Chloe Grace Moritz) is a phenomenal character who is or can look like whatever she wants – a whale, a mouse or a people person like person. The world in which this story transpires is kinda like our contemporary world technology wise, if not futuristic, but the aesthetic is knights and lords and ladies and armour and swords and shit like that, but the swords shoot lasers if they want. What even is this setting?
Doesn’t matter. What matters is that ND Stephenson is a phenomenal and phenomenally funny writer, and they created a solid basis for this multitude of writers to put together something that showcases the three main important characters.
Foremost, is obviously Nimona. But it’s the why of it, why she gets involved in the story that’s the crux of everything.
At first, despite her name being the title of the film, it doesn’t appear to be about Nimona at all. It seems like it’s the story of Ballister Boldheart (Riz Ahmed), and how he was some kind of orphan dark-skinned peasant, but someone for some reason took a chance and elevated him to the knights. And as a knight of the Institute, he is the best of the best at all the knightly stuff, like probably jousting, or swordfighting, or rescuing cats up trees.
On the day where the knights are being, uh, knighted, someone tampers with Ballister’s sword such that it murders the queen who’s knighting him. He seems more shocked than anybody, but everyone else, especially the Director of the Institute (Frances Conroy), acts all disappointed and like they knew all along that he would fuck something up like the commoner scum that he is.
The city’s founding myth is that a thousand years ago, a great hero called Gloreth vanquished some tremendous beast, then built a massive wall and then people spontaneously appeared and thrived. That this is obviously bullshit is never questioned by anyone.
A descendent of Gloreth’s, being the delightfully named Ambrosius Goldenloin (Eugene Lee Yang), is an Aryan poster boy. He’s conflicted about the turn of events involving Ballister, especially since they love each other, but also, when Ballister’s messed up sword is busy killing the queen, Ambrosius feels obligated to cut Ballister’s arm off.
I mean I guess it’s to stop him from killing someone he’s clearly killed already, but he didn’t know that I guess.
Ballister, surprisingly, isn’t one to hold a grudge, and instead of being grumpy about losing his arm, constructs a mechanical replacement in a few minutes flat. And so once he becomes the most hated person in the whole city, one which no-one can leave (for… reasons), Nimona appears out of nowhere, thinking that they can now become best buds and do evil together, solely based on the fact that he’s the most hated person in the world.
Nimona appears and disappears at will, but it’s a while before Ballister (and us in the audience) figure out what she’s doing. He thinks he can clear his name and bring people to justice and all that bullshit, but Nimona keeps encouraging him to just break shit and attack people, like she loves doing.
We get the clear idea that whatever the hell she is, the main reason why she wants to commit carnage is because people have treated her like a monster whenever they’ve seen what she can do. And all these people looking at her with horror has made her become the bad guy, pretty much.
And she wants Ballister to embrace his villainous side as well. But what they really want, what they all really want, I think, is for Ballister and Ambrosius to get back together and to be her two dads.
The Director won’t allow that. It’s probably out of racism or homophobia, or just her general controlling nature. I understand that she wants to maintain power at all costs, but I’m not sure I really understood why.
Like, okay, foundation myths are always bullshit, and serve those in power, but I never understood why she needed to maintain the myth in order to scare people into not going beyond the walls of the city.
She could have at least tried to convince them that huge skinless giants roamed the countryside wanting to eat people, and that the walls were the only thing keeping them out, but she doesn’t even go to that level of effort.
But she is quick with a lie when required: she convinces the easily duped masses and the knights that Nimona is the monster from their founding origin myth, and that if they don’t destroy her, Nimona will kill them all.
Damn, what I would have given for that to be the real ending: Nimona standing tall on a mountain of knight corpses, cackling as she munches through the pile.
Since there are no restrictions on her size, she does eventually grow to the size of a Godzilla-like kaiju, but it’s for the most depressing of purposes. It was gutting to see, as in it’s been an element in the last two animated movies I’ve seen, where major characters would rather die / be annihilated than live with disappointment and ostracism.
I can’t tell people what to do, but it’s a depressing message, and I feel uncomfortable seeing it in stuff that mostly marketed to kids.
Of course this flick doesn’t stick with that path, aiming for an ending that’s neat and pleasing, even if it still doesn’t explain how and why people live these knights and maidens lives when they don’t have to, or how feudalism persisted in a place where economically and technologically it would have been pointless to maintain. But the important thing is that Nimona gets to tear shit up in anarchic ways, and she eventually (we might hope) gets the found family she always craved.
The action is really well done, and the punk soundtrack used alongside many of those action scenes is much appreciated (even if it’s a bit of a contradiction, since Nimona’s signature catch phrase is “so metal” and the devil horns hand gesture), but I loved every silly, violent, heartbreaking second she was on the screen.
And Riz Ahmed does perfectly fine, and is pretty funny as Ballister, as someone who does the right thing even when he realises he’s part of an entirely corrupt system.
Nimona. For when the establishment needs to be destroyed by a shape-changing chaos agent.
8 times she should have bitten off more knights heads out of 10
--
“This is the man who cut off your arm. Arm-chopping is not a love language!” – it certainly isn’t - Nimona
- 474 reads