Tin Man

Over the last 70 years the story of a girl named Dorothy, her three companions – a man made of tin, a lion who walks on two legs, and a scarecrow imbued with life – and a quest to get to the one place that can make her whole again has captivated the imaginations of viewers, writers and readers everywhere. The same is true of this newest twist on a classic story, Tin Man. A world reimagined and reinvented in steampunk fashion with characters that are the same, except not, this story is a tribute to the original, but also has a flavour those who are not fans of the original can get into. I just wish it wasn’t four and a half hours long.

Tin Man is the story os DG, a girl who lives in a small town in Somewhere, USA. She has two loving parents who want only the best of her, but she is beginning to feel as if she doesn’t belong, planning a trip to Australia. Of late she has become flighty and dreamy. Switch to The O-Z (stands for Outer Zone) where the world has been destroyed by Azkadellia, an evil witch who is searching for an emerald throughout the land. If she holds this emerald at the moment of an upcoming solar eclipse (which is quite a feat considering this world has two suns) she will achieve ultimate power, plungin The O-Z into darkness forever under her reign. Azkadellia is told by one of her ‘seers’ – enslaved psychic lions – that there is a ‘light’ that will stand in herpath to get the emerald. Angered she sends her troops, called Longcoats, into the DG’s world to destroy her. In a tornado (literally) of inter-dimensional travel DG finds herself in The O-Z looking for her parents who were also sucked in by the storm. As she begins her quest to look for her parents she meets Glitch, a man who has had part of his brain removed, but fervently believes that he used to be a high level aide to the Queen. Together Glitch and DG find Wyatt Cain, a man who has lost his family – watching them brutally murdered by Longcoats – and his will to do anythng except take his revenge on the men responsible. Cain used to be a police man – a Tin Man – and has a number of connections to assist them in the finding of DG’s parents and Cain’s revenge. From there the meet Raw, King of the lions, who had run away from his kingdom when the Longocats came searching for the emerald. He is now ostracized from his people and doesn’t know how to redeem himself. The four of them begin the search to find a man named The Wizard, the truth about DG’s family and a way to stop Azkadellia, saving The O-Z forever.

Boasting a brilliant cast including Zooey Deschanel, Alan Cumming, Neal McDonough, Callum Keith Rennie, Richard Dreyfuss and Kathleen Robertson, this movie should have been just plain awesome… but somehow it wasn’t. It has signficant pacing issues and, for such a long movie, they haven’t used their time very well. The main character, DG, is almost completely absent in the worst role I’ve seen Zooey Deschanel in to date. She just kind of wanders around the screen looking stunned and vacant and doesn’t really come into her own until the end, and even then, not really. It seems that there’s little reason to have such an absent main character since it’s her journey we’re following. I know the original Dorothy was a little dippy, but at heast she had heart and you liked her enough to take that journey with her. Not the case here.

That said, I did find Neal McDonough to be wonderful as the Tin Man and Alan Cummings to be perfect at Glitch (the scarecrow). Both of them surprised me with their depth and more than made up of the total lack of DG in the movie. I have long disliked Kathleen Robertson but this is likely due to the role she played on 90210 moe than her actual ability. She was excellent in her role as Azkadellia and I had to wonder if they made DG so blank because this is really her story or if the story gravated towards her because DG was so blank. In either case, at least they gave you something else to focus on.

I must give a brief highlight, however, to Richard Dreyfus, whose work here was better than I’ve seen him in a long, long time. This only served to remind of the brilliant actor I remember him as and that we should certainly see more of him. Especially in a character role.

There’s some neat twists on the original story, but I don’t want to ruin it for you. The set design was brilliant, but the CGI looked almost as bad as Wolverine, although I couldn’t figure out why. It seemed they had the cash for everything else, why stop short of a truly brilliant visual look.

All in all I did like this movie. Despite its obvious faults I wanted to keep watching, indicating that even though there was more than enough to find fault with, there was clearly a story that held my attention. I’m going to go ahead and recommend this movie to sci-fi and fantasy fans of all kinds, since I think it’s a pretty good showing. It’s too bad though, it could have been genuinely amazing.