I was supposed to see Sex Tape tomorrow. It’s not like I was all that excited about it, and, hey, gift horses and all that. But the screening schedule got changed, and now I’ll be reviewing Planes: Fire and Rescue instead, the cash-grab Disney sequel to the 2013 cash-grab spin-off of a Pixar cash-grab sequel to what is apparently an okay movie called Cars that’s responsible for this whole mess called The World of Cars. I wouldn’t know, I’ve never seen a Cars, but figured I ought to at least see the first Planes before approaching the sequel. I guess you can probably tell from this paragraph what kind of an experience that was.
Planes takes place in a post-apocalyptic future in which sentient machines have risen up to destroy all humanity in the last great war fought by mankind. This is never explicitly stated in the film, you just have to intuit it from the background details of Planes, otherwise it’s a world that makes no sense at all. The film’s main character is a crop-duster who tends to cornfields for a planet that has no organic beings to consume them. He’s mentored by a crusty war-veteren of a fighter plane on how to be a flying ace, and you get a flashback where the fighter plane’s whole squadron is shot down in explosive hellfire by aircraft carriers. These aircraft carriers don’t have eyes and a mouth like the other aircraft carriers in the film’s present day, so presumably they were operated by what was once the human resistance to the new machine world order.
Presumably the vehicles of the present day have been infected by some sort of memory-wiping nano-virus, acting as caretakers for the planet, perhaps in wait for their creator species to return, unaware that they pushed their masters to extinction decades ago. This is probably why the film is structured as a lazy underdog sports story about the crop-duster (voiced by sentient glop of hair gel, Dane Cooke) competing in a Tour de France-style air race around the world, seeing as everything in this movie is so horribly clichéd, you could literally swap the planes for humans, and it’s the same movie.
France was presumably eradicated during the war, as one of the planes in the race is French-Canadian, and therefore among the least offensive stereotypes that Planes relies on over the course of an interminable 90-minute run. The British plane is stuffy and drinks tea; the Mexican plane wears a luchador mask and calls the Quebecois plane cute nicknames like “enchilada” and “burrito”; the Indian plane talks about how tractors are sacred in her country, and believes everyone will be reincarnated as them after death. The tractors look pretty much like any of the other vehicles, just slightly bovine-ized. Perhaps this hints at a former betrayal by the tractor faction during The Last War, one that saw this traitor species enslaved for siding with the humans.
Planes is like some horrible pick-two scenario that John Lasseter came up. “Disney, if you make this movie, it’s going to be some combination of horrible, racist, and frightening.” Disney then mulled over its options, and asked, “can’t it be all 3?” Oh, and it’s also weirdly sexist too, let’s not forget that! The crop-duster is smitten by how “aerodynamic” the Indian plane is, just as the Mexican plane goes gaga over the sleek curves and surfaces of the French-Canadian one. To paraphrase Nathan Rabin when discussing another animated film that creepily oversexualized its non-human characters, it’s as if the animators were thinking, “oh man, if we do our jobs correctly, everyone is going to want to fuck these planes!”
I’m just going to leave you with this one last frightening image, and remind you that Planes: Fire & Rescue is in theatres Friday.
