Review of The Water Man: Family Adventure Movies on Netflix

Review of The Water Man, directed by David Oyelowo and written by Emma Needell. The Netflix family drama adventure film stars Rosario Dawson, Lonnie Chavis, Amiah Miller, Maria Bello, Alfred Molina and David Oyelowo himself. The premiere of The Water Man is on July 9, 2021.

Review of The Water Man

Something Netflix wants us to drop when in one of the close-ups of The Water Man we find a metal lunch box for children with an illustration of the wonderful ET, the extraterrestrial.

Indeed, we are premiering. Netflix has released The Water Man on its platform, an adventure and drama film directed by fellow actor David Oyelowo in which it becomes his debut feature.

Did you miss these :- Analysis of resident evil: infinite darkness

As you can imagine judging by the first paragraph that heads these lines, Netflix brings us the premiere of a movie for the whole family, but looking for that charm that hypnotized us in the cinema of the 80s and 90s.

The water man is a mystery. A ghost. And also the hope of Gunner Boone (Lonnie Chavis), a cartoonist boy with a very creative mind whose mother, Mary (Rosario Dawson) suffers from advanced cancer.

His father, Amos (David Oyelowo) wants to protect him from the suffering of his wife's illness, but also to protect her from any concern. Gunner, hoping for a flag, meets the mysterious Jo (Amiah Miller) and sets out together with her on a mission through the forest to save her mother thanks to the healing power of a mythical figure from village stories. 

From the credits in which we can see the character of David Oyelowo driving home by car, we can discover the intention of the film and its theme: love, life and death. In quick succession, it shows white couples sharing food on the street, but also an elderly dolled-up woman standing alone on the sidewalk.

The longing for a long life or a critique of the eternally Caucasian representation of the family adventure cinema of the 80s. The chromatic range of the photography and the veil of mystery with which it covers the fantastic story of The Waterman seem to favor the second option.

The cinema of a past decade ... without the spell of its stories

Festooned like a fable, the new Netflix movie wants to talk to children about loss. In a figurative and also literal sense; the fear of adult life and that process in which we strip ourselves of childhood innocence, together with the harshest reality that walks hand in hand with life. Lonnie Chavis's little Gunner pretends to be reflected in them.

Did you miss these :- Permission to Dance: All the SECRETS Behind BTS's New Single

To construct this parable, David Oyelowo takes advantage of the artistic talents of the Gunner character to introduce through animation and drawings the fantasy that surrounds the film : the history and origin of The Man Water and Gunner's tender imagination.

And is that the character played by young Lonnie Chavis is absolutely charming thanks to his own work and the character development resources written by Emma Needell. He tells us how a child wants to fight with all his might against an enemy that seems impossible to defeat, and for this he will use all the weapons at his disposal. And what is a child's most powerful weapon?

The great success of The Water Man is that it does not try to overly infantilize its younger viewers. Instead of masking reality for them, he faces it with courage and with enough pressure so that its echo is much more didactic than oppressive. Much more familiar, after all.

It is inevitable not to think of references such as A monster comes to see me , the particularly attractive film by JA Bayona in which he also uses illustration to draw a child's path to adult life through fables. Its vein is infinitely more artistic and complex, but it points to the same goal.

With everything and that, yes, the Netflix premiere has a really promising start, although it is heading towards a resolution that may be more anodyne than it promises in the first bars.

Gunner and Jo's adventures come down to little more than boy scout camping. All the fantasy that surrounds the opening and climax of the film completely disappears in the development of the second act, which begs for the inspiration of that animation so well executed.

It is not a question of interpretation. Lonnie Chavis and Amiah Miller do a remarkable job. It is, quite simply, an adventure with few emotions that takes few risks. The obstacles encountered in your quest for The Waterman are tension-free, even for the little ones.

This is where that animation could have fitted in as the missing piece of the puzzle in the box. A formula that they had already developed and that would have allowed a narrative connection to give more force to the less interesting part of the story.

In that sense, from his approach and with the photographic style with which his Gunner adventure starts, it becomes an unfulfilled promise. 

It wants to be mystical, memorable and unique. It introduces us to a girl with colored hair who tells stories like the best chapters of Nightmares and a young man who goes on an adventure with a map, a katana and a backpack in which he carries much more than hope. It is inevitable that we expect more than a couple of wild animals making noise.

There is also a subplot that relates Jo, the character of Amiah Miller, a police investigation and a father who is far from who he pretends to be, but remains an anecdote whose construction makes him a more populist resource than narratively binding.

The water man is a tender, agile film and absolutely enjoyable as a family. On one side of the scale, it fails to activate the springs that make it a story to remember, nor does the soundtrack or its characters have enough charisma to hook us.

In the other, we have a movie that he wants to like. There is not a particularly prolific offering of this type of cinema at the moment, so the message it aims to convey can be an incentive that fits many families.

Childhood adventures bring us the best memories of our childhood in theaters, but they all have one trait in common: magic . The one that appears between characters that we will remember with affection and nostalgia, in fantastic settings in which we want to be part and stories of innocent friendship with which we identify. The water man has some of these ingredients, but the rabbit fails to appear when he lifts the hat.

The best about The Water Man

His didactic intention without infantilizing his audience and his approach that fondly recalls the 80s.

The worst about The Water Man

It has the ingredients, but it lacks the magic of a cinema that only remembers in shape.