38. Orion and the Dark
Sigh.
Look, I get it okay?
I understand that this movie is beautiful and it’s deep and it’s ambitious and it has themes… and that’s great. It even has some really neat designs too. But… I gotta be honest, when it was all said and done, I don’t know if I got a ton out of it.
It’s not really the fault of the film’s ideas or what the story being told was doing or saying (or rather TRYING to do or say). It was more the fault of the structure for me. This film was based on a book and you can tell based on the designs of the characters. Everyone’s eyes literally being right next to each other is a bit freaky. I never really got used to it. Perhaps it would look better if it was 2D but that's not allowed anymore for some reason. It’s a style thing so whatever.
Orion (Jacob Tremblay) is an 11 year old boy who is super paranoid and afraid of everything. His anxiety has it so that he’s constantly freaking out about possibilities and eventualities of things that could happen. I…well, let’s just say, the movie started off on the right foot with this character. I related so hard with Orion it hurts. Especially the part where he talks about being afraid of death because of the concept of it being ‘nothing’. I’ve never seen anyone, animated or otherwise, articulate the same fear of death as I see it where they point out how being nothing doesn’t mean being stuck in darkness or being in constant pain. It’s just a thing you can’t experience and have no frame of reference for. The idea of being afraid of being nothing makes no sense on the face of it because you’ll have no concept of it. It just isn’t possible to ask your brain to conceptualize it.
It’s like asking you to recall how you felt during the days where you weren’t born. Were you floating in the void of nothing, scared and in pain, while Abraham Lincoln was out there four scoring and seven years ago-ing? No. You just didn’t exist. The concept of non-existence to an individual is impossible to articulate. We all came from that nothing and we’ll all go back to it eventually… but we have no memories or feelings regarding it before our birth.
It’s freaky and weird to think about. A time where I didn’t exist? How?
Despite how relatable everything about Orion's character is, his fear of the dark is one that while also relatable isn’t the biggest deal to me. I tend to find the dark kind of inviting despite sometimes being afraid of it. I kind of like being afraid of the dark sometimes. Halloween is my favorite time of year, usually. Other times it’s Christmas.
But the Dark (Seth Rogan) took that personally. It comes to Orion’s house one night and tells him that he hates that everyone hates him and thinks he’s scary and Orion is the biggest offender of that. So he hatches a plan to take him on an adventure with him. It’s a 24 hour cycle where they go around the Earth and do Dark’s job of bringing night time to the world. Along the way, they meet five other entities of the night that all have… "important" jobs to do at night.
Well… they vary in terms of degree of importance. Sweet Dreams (Angela Bassett) gives people good dreams. Sleep (Natasia Demetriou) puts people to sleep. Quiet (Aparna Nancherla) keeps things quiet and peaceful.
Sounds good so far. Quiet is a little baffling because whether or not stuff is quiet at night is up to where you are. Like, yeah, it’s usually super quiet at night when you go downstairs to get a drink and you’re worried about waking people up. A pin dropping feels like it could make the loudest noise in the world when it lands at night. But Quiet’s nowhere to be found in Time Square at night where the lights are always on and it’s bright and noisy as sin.
The other entities are Insomnia (Nat Faxon) and Unexplained Noises (Golda Rosheuvel). These two confuse me.
Insomnia’s job is to torment people with worries that PREVENT them from falling asleep, which is the opposite of Sleep’s job. Yet he’s friends with sleep. They’re not enemies or anything. They all work together to do these night time jobs and they follow Dark’s lead. Insomnia does end up proving useful throughout the film though. There ARE times where people do need to wake up, such as when there’s a fire or in Orion’s case when he’s literally about to die if he doesn’t. But the nature of insomnia being posed as this thing that’s necessary for night time escapades feels a little off.
Then there’s Unexplained Noises who is just…useless. As an entity and as a character. She’s a megaphone person, I think, and her job is to just make creepy noises outside of children’s houses to keep them from falling asleep. Again, the opposite of Quiet’s job but even more of a confusing mess because I don’t know why this would even be a job.
I guess the idea is just that they’re all concepts that make up the night and saying these are their “jobs” is just a way to justify them existing. At least in terms of this story. Didn't really do too good a job of that with Unexplained Noises here though. You know, at least they tried with Insomnia.
They go around the world and have to stay out of the way of Light (Ike Barinholtz). If Light ever catches up with Dark then Dark will be obliterated. Light is your hunky cool guy. He waits for no man. Dark doesn’t seem to like him and pushes his insecurities onto him, which Light points out whenever they’re in a close enough proximity together.
He comes off more as the Metro Man to Dark’s Mega Mind if you will. Significantly less developed but that’s fine. It’s not really necessary to get to know more about him.
The point is that this is a story that’s being told to us about these concepts coming to life and helping Orion through his troubles… for part of the film.
However, the film takes a really weird turn where it just… stops being about that and shifts to the future where Orion is a dad telling this story to his daughter, Hypatia (Mia Akemi Brown).
So… already it’s spoiled to us that Orion is fine in the future. Initially I didn’t like this but I guess we all could have guessed it’d turn out fine for him… even though I always prefer things be left up in the air until the end, regardless. I mean, you're telling a story. There's should be some illusion as to what'll happen to the main character by the end and it doesn't have to just be a question of whether they live or not.
Plus, there was still the underlying wonder if the story Orion was telling was true and this was just a backdrop being used to tell it. But no uh, it's not true. The movie just decides to tell us all this didn't happen part-way through it. That killed the momentum for me, honestly.
I thought this was a really weird time to cut to the future and have this shown to us. Usually you either begin the film this way or reveal it at the end but they do this like a fourth of the way through it? Odd choice, I thought… but then they cut back to the future again and extend the scene a bit to where Orion takes his daughter outside for a walk because he’s making the story up in real time and doesn’t know how it ends. We also see that he hasn’t 100% gotten over his fear of the dark.
So… that was interesting. The part of him that was still sort of afraid of the dark made me think the story might not have as happy an ending for Dark as I thought BUT… the fact that he was making it up as he went along was just straight up proof that this wasn’t one of those films where it was going to be revealed this all DID happen to him. Dark and his friends weren’t going to show up at the end of the film to surprise Orion and his daughter and talk about how long it’s been or anything like that.
And I was right. That didn’t happen. So it was a bit of a bummer to then learn that none of what he was saying really happened… but could I still enjoy it as an abstract thing? I was a bit taken off guard by the film doing this and at this point in the story I wasn’t sure what to think about what was happening or how to handle it.
The film started off making me think I should care about Dark and what he was going through but part way through it they just tell me that no I shouldn’t. Dark isn’t real and the emotional turmoil he’s going through about being disliked by everyone doesn’t matter. It does still lean on the idea that having an appreciation for the dark is a thing you should and could still do but personifying him as a character and THEN telling me his character doesn’t exist is still a really weird thing to do!
But no it gets stranger. After Dark gets so depressed that he decides to do a suicide by letting light consume him, the world is BAKED in nothing but light. This happens after all of Dark’s friends realize they want to see what living in the light is like and they quickly find out that without Dark it kind of sucks. Everyone is constantly irritated and angry and loud and it’s just a really bad time.
So… then uh… Orion’s daughter enters the story. Like, literally, she inserts herself into the story and helps her dad finish it by helping 11-year old Orion save Dark. They do this by going into his mind while he sleeps because he still exists in Orion’s memory and then the concept of nothing opens up and almost sucks them in. Insomnia wakes them up and Dark returns and everything is saved… but then the film keeps on going and by this point I was drowning in confusion.
I'm sorry. Are you still following me? Yes? No? Regardless of the answer I'm going to continue.
So, I did eventually GET what was going on but in the moment it confused the fuck out of me that the film was pivoting yet again. Cause all of a sudden, Orion’s daughter is like “How am I going to get back to the future?!” and her and little Orion panic and treat this like a really big issue until a kid from the future shows up and spills his backstory to them and takes her to the future for her and they say goodbye and…
Then… then he shows up in Adult Orion’s room to drop her off and Adult Orion is like “Long time no see”... and then… all of a sudden the DAUGHTER of Orion is an adult now and it turns out that this whole time HER SON was telling this story of that kid from the future taking little girl her back to Adult Orion’s future where he was telling his daughter the fake story of when he met dark when he was a little boy.
It… is… a choice.
I promise you I am not exaggerating. This is what happens.
It was… SO fucking confusing in the moment.
I cannot reiterate to you how many times I belted out “What the fuck is happening?” at the screen when I was watching it.
Turns out Orion is actually a really old man and has a really old wife and the movie ends with a flashback to 11-year old Orion sitting next to the girl he was worried about asking out. Cause that was also a thing. It was a very important thing but so much of the film focuses on his fear of the dark that I guess I didn’t consider it too relevant. It could have BEEN more relevant. If they had used his fear of the dark as a springboard for him getting over his fear of talking to this girl and going to the light show museum thing they took me to when I was in elementary school where we look at the ceiling to see a simulation of space… that would have been fine. It almost feels like that’s what they’re going to do at one point but no. Not really.
There’s-there’s-there’s… so much that this film is trying to say and do all at once and I get it. At the end I understood what they were going for but holy shit man. I think the ambition here went a little too far. The structure of this film, as is, confused me too much. I’m also just personally not on board with this being a made up story on top of that.
It’s got so many dramatic moments that they take so seriously but it’s all being made up on the fly by these characters (two generations into the future as we find out) and it’s like… who cares?
I don’t… really see why it had to be done this way. It’s odd because I like Orion and I like Dark AS characters but with one of them not existing and the other having a journey that is… confused and not something that’s POSSIBLE to articulate I just feel a bit left out in the cold with this one by the end.
I couldn’t tell you what Orion’s journey was watching this film. All I know is that he used to be afraid of everything but, I guess, he got over it. Somehow.
I don't KNOW how because his story was fake.
Hell, for all I know, he could have been exaggerating how scared he was of everything when he was a kid. How the fuck would I know? Everything else was made up right?
Really relatable main character at the start. That won a lot of points with me. Dark as a character was really nice too… when I felt he was more of a character then he was. Even as an abstract concept within this story he still works but it just makes everything else feel even more wasted for me. The movie looks pretty and it’s got really great themes and stuff but I really think they should have gone for a less confusing structure.
Stories where the story is made up can be fun but usually those are done in a comedic context to help soften the blow of them not being real. Or it could be a thing where the structure is short and simple enough that it can just be a fun ride. With it being so dramatic when there’s really nothing at stake I just wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be feeling IN the moment even if I did eventually get it by the end.
So yeah. Really ambitious project. I’m glad I saw it. Really don't want to see it again.
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2 months, 2 weeks ago
21 Mar 2025 21:11 CET
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