I saw Mega Mind (3D) with a young member of the family today and kept thinking there was something I wasn’t getting. It’s a great looking movie with a clever premise: an evil mastermind kills his opponent, realizes he has no purpose, and then becomes good in order to fight a much worse mastermind. But something kept playing in the subtext, something I am sure it’s target audience didn’t get: it was full of images of Obama and September 11.
Posters of Mega Mind, looking queerly like Obama, is splashed on every building with the catch phrase “No I Won’t.”
But far more curious, the town looks like New York with the Freedom Tower reaching high above the rooftops. And there is a weird scene when the skyscrapers come crashing down in a way that actually looked a lot like the Twin Towers.
It felt strange. Not quite insulting. But it was an unrelenting subtext — in scene after scene after scene, in 3D, it was as if someone had stuck a silly Will Farrell cartoon on CNN footage of the attacks.
The movie was fine. Whatever.
But if you see it, I’d be curious to know if you saw the same thing I did or if I’m just feeling particularly sensitive tonight.
I think a lot of megamind was a parody of modern politics. The Obama sign “No you can’t” was clearly intentional, but I didn’t see any offense in it. Just very clever! Obviously there was a second level of humor for it’s adult viewers; but I wouldn’t agree that children were the target audience of megamind. Although child appropriate, the jokes were all directed at comic book lovers; a parody/ analysis of the relationships between superheroes and supervillains. There were a lot of subtle things that I think only the real nerds got. But I didn’t see anything insensitive or terrifying about the movie. I thought it was highly underrated!
Oh my god, I was thinking the exact same thing
Thought the same in the theater and confirmed now on rewatch on DVD. After seeing real skyscrapers exploded and buckling to the ground, it seemed (looking for right word here)…inappropriate…offensive…uncomfortable…not sure but not quite right.
I realize there can’t be a moratorium on falling skyscrapers in movies forever. But the 9/11esque scenes in Megamind were either intentional, in which case the producers should be ashamed of themselves for making the reference in such a farcical movie, or unintentional, in which case they should be chastised for being so clueless about their insensitivity.
I just saw Megamind on DVD and had the same reaction to the scene where Titan is laying waste to Metrocity. Perhaps one of the dangers of the increased sophistication of CGI animation is that the imagery in these films is becoming more and more realistic. I don’t know how the folks at Dreamworks could not have noticed the similarity between the images of Titan smashing the decapitated section of one skyscraper into another smaller skyscraper and the images from 9/11 of the WTC towers being blown apart and reduced to rubble.
Thanks for the comment, William. I am glad to know that I wasn’t the only one to see this. It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but the only thing I remember is that it looks like 9/11.