Gulliver's Travels

Release Date: December 25, 2010

Watch Date: March 20, 2023

 

    Bob and I have this weird thing that we like to do, maybe it’s not weird but in the context of how old we are it does make me feel like we might be a sixty-year old married couple instead of one in our mid twenties, where we like to read novels together. I have this set of classic novels that I was given as a child for Christmas, because yes, I was old even then and at age eight a set of classic novels that included Moby Dick and Oliver Twist and The Jungle Book was actually a great present for me. So, why not, we thought, work our way through them? Clearly, we’re completionists. We like to see a set of something and finish it.

    So we finished Gulliver’s Travels, which is meant to be a comedy but some two-hundred years later might have lost some of it’s oomph, and we thought, why not watch the Jack Black film that’s based on the novel and for sure extremely accurate to the novel.

    It’s…not. But that’s fine. Does it miss the entire political point? Does it actually cease to be satire and instead just become a comedy about ‘these people are little and this man is big’. Sure. Would Jonathan Swift probably be rolling over in his grave because oh my god did the producers of the film miss the entire point of his work? Definitely.

    Or, maybe, he’d have enjoyed watching Jack Black make tiny people act out Star Wars for his entertainment. I didn’t know the author personally, I couldn’t tell you.

    What I can tell you is that Bob enjoyed the film version a lot more than the novel version, but the man does love Jack Black, and he does appreciate a good comedy, so this movie was set up for success in his eyes from the very beginning.

    Look, this film isn’t Gulliver’s Travels, in the strict sense that Gulliver doesn’t really travel, he is kind of stranded while attempting to impress a girl, and he honestly doesn’t seem that eager to get back to her. The romance is kind of unnecessary really, since the girl only shows up in the first and last ten minutes of the film, and while he references her a lot, other than his main motivation being to impress her – though how he plans to do that while trapped and unwilling to live Lilliput I couldn’t tell you – it could probably have just been a guy wanting to progress in his career and the movie would have had just as much entertainment value.

    It’s actually kind of a star studded cast, which I wasn’t expecting but definitely appreciated. Emily Blunt and Jason Segal are not the world’s most believable couple, but I think even the characters know that they don’t quite fit. And because it’s Jack Black there’s a song that’s sort of forced in to the ending sequence, which is fun and I definitely sung along to it, but it could have been just as easily left out and no one would have missed it.

    If you ask me, the novel is better, if you ask Bob, the film is, so you mileage may very depending on just what you find entertaining. It’s not a bad film, and it’s not a bad tribute to the source material, it’s just different. If you’re in the right mood, different might be exactly what you’re looking for.