Brad Bird has directed seven movies. To varying degrees, all of them except Ratatouille (which he was brought in to finish after its original director left Pixar) concern themselves with retro futures. Tomorrowland may be Bird’s weakest film, but it’s his best title, because it describes the place where pretty much all of Bird’s films are set: The past’s vision of an imaginary tomorrow that never came to pass.
Now he’s made perhaps the purest expression of that ethos to date. Ray Gunn, directed by Bird at Skydance Animation and released by Netflix, takes place in a sprawling sci-fi city called Metropia that looks like Coruscant from Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones; an endless grid of towering skyscrapers so tall they’re navigated by rocket-powered elevators, surrounded by bumper-to-bumper mid-air traffic from thousands of hovercars. But the story Bird follows, one he’s supposedly wanted to tell for more than 30 years, is pure Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, with a grizzled private eye on the trail of a mystery that threatens to unravel a secret about the very nature of this society.
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The film’s title is also its protagonist, who — if someone could have plausibly created a futuristic world built of flying cars and matter-manipulating lasers in 1942 — might have been played by Humphrey Bogart. In Ray Gunn, he’s voiced by Sam Rockwell, who brings appropriate levels of world-weary decency to the role of this gumshoe desperately clinging to his principles in a world defined by its lack of them. But with creditors regularly visiting his office to repossess his furniture, he reluctantly takes a well-playing but sleazy job keeping tabs on Metropia’s biggest pop star, the fiery Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson).
The universe of Ray Gunn with its laser blasters, jet packs, and all sorts of other fanciful gadgets, feels familiar from a century of genre fiction. But Ray’s adventure with Venus is full of surprises, as Bird and co-writer Matthew Robbins, take the viewers through a crime story more fitting for film noir than a children’s cartoon. (Ray Gunn is rated PG, but it’s darker and more mature than typical animated fare.) It also boasts some inspired casting choices, most prominently the great, gruff Tom Waits as Eyera (pronounced “Ira”) as Ray’s spindly alien sidekick, whose loyalty special powers (like a literally photographic memory) are nearly as valuable to Ray as his boundless loyalty.
Like so many of Bird’s movies, Ray Gunn is an affectionate love letter to all of his obsessions. There are aliens who are clearly designed as homages to 1940s character actors like Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. Venus’s swooping hairdo suggests she would have been played by Veronica Lake in the live-action version of this film. There are weapon and vehicle designs that could have been pulled straight out of Buck Rogers or Forbidden Planet.
But despite all of that vintage flavor, Ray Gunn somehow doesn’t feel stodgy or old fashioned. It’s got a frenetic pace, a solid sense of fun, and an ample supply of stellar chase scenes from Bird, who may be the most underrated working director of action in animation and live-action in Hollywood today. (Remember: This is the guy who directed Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, and those incredible scenes atop the Burj Khalifa.) He really takes his time establishing and fleshing out the world of Metropia, introducing various bits of tech that he can then pay off later in all sorts of inventive and satisfying ways. (Just wait until you see what he does with those rocket-powered elevators.)
It’s been eight years since Bird’s previous directorial effort, Incredibles 2, and more than a decade since his last original film, Tomorrowland. In that time, the present has only gotten bleaker, and optimistic sci-fi films have grown rarer and rarer. Ray Gunn isn’t precisely a hopeful movie, either; its retro future is rife with crime, corruption, and racism. (Aliens like Ray’s pal Eyera face discrimination and bigotry from most of the native human population.) Still, there’s something appealing about its nostalgic futurism now. We can’t go back to a time when a brighter tomorrow seemed inevitable. But at least Brad Bird’s still around to give us a glimpse of one every so often.
RATING: 8/10
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