“Slumberland,” the latest big-budget adventure film from Netflix, is something like an “Inception” for kids, featuring a precocious young girl, a cute stuffed pig, and a towering, stinky sidekick. Written by David Guion and Michael Handelman, “Slumberland” has some snazzy fun with the concept of how dreams take us to similar experiences—about forgetting to wear pants, driving a runaway truck, or endless staircases. Illustrated with grabbing imagination by director Francis Lawrence and a hard-working special effects team, the movie zips between different dreams while using kid’s movie mainstays for a mighty familiar emotional plot. Yup, this one has parent loss, metaphor-driven storytelling, a bunch of corny jokes, and some big lunges in plotting just to keep everything moving. And “Slumberland” is the type of storytelling that wants you to be carried away most of all by its special effects, which can be charming up to a point.
Marlow Barkley stars in the movie as Nemo, a preteen who lives in a lighthouse with her whimsical dad Peter (Kyle Chandler) until one day he is lost at sea. Her city-living uncle, Philip (a reserved Chris O’Dowd), is given custody, despite having no idea of how to take care of her, which makes him even more of a desaturated square than his life path as a doorknob savant. Nemo aches to be with her father again and finds an escape in a world that her father had traversed: Slumberland, a type of expansive universe that connects every sleeper out there.
In her dreams, Nemo’s stuffed animal Pig comes alive, and so too does her bed—it grows giant legs and takes her from her new bedroom in the city and back to the lighthouse, deep into a world that functions beyond the constructs of reality, AKA the “Waking World.” And in Slumberland she meets a towering self-proclaimed outlaw named Flip (Jason Momoa), an old friend of her father, who has fangs, horns, and a too-cool-for-school attitude he sometimes pairs with cool sunglasses or the vandalizing of a Twinkie vending machine.
For years and years, Flip has been living an adventurous life that Peter used to tell Nemo about as bedtime stories. She’s excited to see that Flip is real (and stinky like her dad said) but has to tolerate his stubborn nature and general showboating. They are soon bonded by a quest to find pearls in the deep, dark expanses of the Sea of Nightmares, which will allow anything they want to happen. She wants to use the pearls to see her father again; he wants to use the pearls to remember who he is in the Waking World, having been in Slumberland so long, jumping from dream to dream to dream, that he’s forgotten.
“Slumberland” gets overly busy with all of its different pieces to help make its idea of a dream world believable enough, including its established rules: If you die in Slumberland you can’t go back to real life, and it’s also Game Over if you’re swallowed up by billowing squid clouds that can suddenly appear and represent nightmares. You can leave dreams when you’re scared, and return to them by simply sleeping, the latter made possible by Nemo sleeping during school. Nemo and Flip’s path to the pearls requires hopping through a series of other people’s dreams, shown to them by a map. But they’re also being pursued by a dream cop (Weruche Opia’s Agent Green), who works for the Bureau of Suspicious Activities and has been hunting Flip for decades, wanting to arrest him for all of his trouble-making across Slumberland.
Directed with enough inspiration by Lawrence, “Slumberland” is like a return to his earlier film “I Am Legend,” which experimented with placing Will Smith in a desolate, post-apocalyptic world and select special effects that provided a strong contrast of what is real and what is not. “Slumberland” has Lawrence playing with a limited cast and extravagant settings, the latter made possible here by a mix of ornate practical sets and some incredible visual effects; its most striking visuals include a far-reaching city of blue glass buildings, and a ballroom full of salsa dancers made of red and brown leaves. Lawrence can’t enliven the realistic, human core of this adventure, but he connects these different sequences with solid pacing.
Momoa treats “Slumberland” as a vehicle to be his hammiest self, which can be lightly amusing at most. His character, Flip, is larger than waking life, and also a vessel for its corny jokes. (“Slumberland” loves Canadian stereotypes in particular, including a dreaming Canuck who rides a goose and talks about Timmies.) At the very least, it’s a good display of his lack of ego, and how he can show the softness in his massive physical presence.
Even more than Momoa, the movie’s tangible imagination and emotions are kept alive by the impressive performance from the rising star Barkley, also seen in the recent “Spirited” Christmas musical, starring Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell. Barkley displays a true sense of being able to make the imagined feel real, while also making us feel something for a story of loss that the script itself tries to shorthand like a few other plotting conveniences. It’s through Barkley’s sense of wonder that we sense the expanse of this evolving green-screen canvas, and also the movie’s underlying, most effective message of not getting lost in a dream world. We have to make something of ourselves in Waking World, even if dreams provide an escape like nothing else.
From start to finish, “Slumberland” uses low angles that look up at its adults, or keep us at Nemo’s eye level, reminding us most of all who this movie is for. Lawrence’s latest is fine for its don’t-over-think-it standards, and while it’s glossier than it is deep, it’s at least charted through with a roller coaster’s engineering. There’s something comforting about a movie that has the true ease of a fantastical dream, and for “Slumberland” that fleeting excitement may be enough. [C+]
“Slumberland” arrives on Netflix on November 18.