Excuse me, we’re looking for someone willing to explore the story a little deeper.
Aardman Productions has done better work in the past, and I fear the entire problem will be laid at the scriptwriters’ feet in the case of Early Man (2018). If you want the executive summary, my Arts Editor laid it out most directly: I don’t care for any of these characters.
Let’s take another Aardman creation as a comparison, the venerable Chicken Run (2000). Their plots are basically the same – a group of creatures face doom unless they can cleverly find a way out of their dilemma. For the chickens in Chicken Run, they are prisoners on a chicken farm, a farm that executes non-producers and, in the course of the story, is about to be converted into a chicken pie production facility, leaving our heroes to be the filling.
Similarly, the primitive cave-men protagonists of Early Man face the loss of their Garden of Eden-like valley at the hands of a group of Bronze-Age aggressors, who want their valley for their mining operation. They have invented avariciousness and a hierarchical society, unlike the more socialistic and equable cave-men, and the cave-dwellers teeter on the edge of extinction.
Both stories have the leader intent on saving their group, but here is where the stories begin to diverge in terms of efficacy. Ginger, the heroine of Chicken Run, is fiercely loyal and intent on saving her band of chickens, even when those seem to be running around as if their heads had been chopped off. The storytellers illustrate her drive to succeed, her willingness to leap any obstacle, to literally jump up and dust herself off after every set-back, no matter how many times she is imprisoned in ‘solitary.’
Her counterpart in Early Man is Dug, a young member of the band who dreams big – he wants to move up from hunting rabbits to taking down a mammoth. But, well, that’s just about it. He’s not the leader of the group, and his best friend is a fairly smart hog. We’re given little reason to admire or even bond with the little guy, outside of the fact that he’s, well, little.
Each story also has its outside element that brings salvation. Rocky Rhodes of Chicken Run is an American rooster, driven to escape the circus in which he performs by being shot out of a cannon, and when he does escape by being blown into the chicken farm, he’s willing to do nearly anything to gain the freedom of the world, including lying, cheating his suppliers – and abandoning the chicken flock that has befriended and saved him. In short, he’s fully fleshed out, a character with a drive and goals of his own, and half the fun of Chicken Run is watching as the needs of the flock, and the idea of justice, of doing the right thing, slowly bends that primeval drive into something useful and communal, rather than self-centered and narcissistic.
Rocky’s counterpart in Early Man is the Bronze Age villager woman Goona, who brings her special skills to the aid of the cavemen. But is she driven? Well, sort of. She wants fame, but she’s not really all that driven. She hasn’t the charisma and attitude of Rocky Rhodes. She’s more or less just a wrench where the plot needed a wrench, not the living, breathing creature that brings a sense of Where is this going? to the story.
And, of course, there’s the doom staring each group in the face. In Chicken Run, this is brought starkly home through an execution scene as a non-producing chicken is beheaded and eaten. In Early Man, though, there’s a far more diffuse threat of being enslaved and made to work in the mines that produce the material for the bronze coins. But little work is done to bring home just how dreadful this might be. There are no mine scenes, there are no cavemen dead from working the mines, there’s nothing visceral to make the skin crawl. It’s more or less a statement from the bad guys.
There are quite a few other parallels, from the big plot mechanisms, to the little bits of cleverness to get over obstacles, to the substantial silliness that all Aardman movies feature, and of course the stop-action and animation is virtually flawless and sometimes admiration-worthy. But in the end, the story fails in Early Man because there’s no willingness to drive the plot points home into the granite of our souls. We have no real attachment to Dug or any of the other cavemen. We don’t have any inkling how bad being a miner might be – heck, maybe they’ll turn into dwarves and re-emerge in Lord Of The Rings, wouldn’t that be fun, eh?
I could see an audience member saying that, and that’s the problem with this movie. That’s actually a plausible plot turn in Early Man. And that’s just not a good sign.
