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THE SECRET KINGDOM: Some Secrets Are Best Left Unshared

THE SECRET KINGDOM: Some Secrets Are Best Left Unshared

THE SECRET KINGDOM: Some Secrets Are Best Left Unshared

When it comes to the fantasy genre you have a very large pool to pull from. From Lord of The Rings and the Narnia books, to The Golden Compass and many many others, you’ll not find yourself lacking in content. Every once in a while someone new will come along and try to add to the already stacked set of the usual suspects and sometimes it’s even a worthwhile addition. The Secret Kingdom is not one of those times. The film had a good story with a positive message at its heart but almost everything about it failed to sell it to us.

The movie opened with a scene we have all watched a million and a half times, a family is in the car pulling into a new house and the children (in this case, Peter and Verity) are not happy about it at all. It’s always a fresh start these families are looking for and the mom and dad are particularly on their guard  in this case (for reasons we will get into later.) It isn’t a big secret that there was some kind of recent trauma that the entire family lived through but until the end they decide not to tell us. It was an unnecessary surprise twist.

Narnia did it better

The children waste no time getting into trouble in their new little town. Peter (played by Sam Everingham) is a young boy who is absolutely afraid of everything but that’s okay because his sister Verity is a giant instigator who gets him to do so many things he wouldn’t normally all because she’s a bit annoying and he just doesn’t want to deal with it. Verity is played by Alyla Browne and spends much of the film doing her best Hermione Granger impersonation. The first thing they do is invade a little trinket shop and are forced to buy part of a magic cube, using only what they have in their pockets, simply because it was knocked to the floor.

THE SECRET KINGDOM: Some Secrets Are Best Left Unshared
source: Signature Entertainment



When Peter and Verity return home they decide to pretend like nothing happened and while both are sitting on Peter’s bed a giant hole opens up in the floor sucking them down to a place called the “beneath.” The beneath is run by hundreds of talking armadillos that the kids can only understand after one of them licks inside their ears (mega gross, I know). Of course, this leads to scene after scene of exposition explaining an ancient prophecy and suddenly Peter is named as king. Sound familiar?

Peter, Verity, and their little talking armadillo tour guide are then off on a journey to solve riddles and find the other missing pieces of the magic cube so they can put it back together and fulfill the prophecy. The prophecy has something to do with restarting time and setting everything back the way it was. Using Peter’s golden compass (I’m telling you, so much of this story was borrowed from other sources) that he received from his grandfather and the armadillo that can only navigate by song, the group heads out in search of the first piece.

Things could have been different

The film was written and directed by Matt Drummond (Journey To Dinosaur Island) and nearly every choice that was made was uninspired. The entire movie was shot either in extreme closeup or a completely animated wide shot using Unreal Engine 4. I understand the limitations that the filmmaker had as far as budget goes and I can even appreciate what he was able to do within those constraints. Some of the creature designs were actually pretty cool but were far from beings used well. In fact, we could be having a completely different conversation had the children been animated as well.

THE SECRET KINGDOM: Some Secrets Are Best Left Unshared
source: Signature Entertainment

Everything was done in-house and on a shoestring budget and one thing you rarely think about in a movie is sound design. You never really have an affinity for good sound design until you sit through a ninety-minute film that does it poorly. So many audio cues were missing that would have helped to sell the animation; footsteps, falling rocks, things breaking, the list goes on and on. Still, I respect the constraints they found themselves in and the perseverance it took to move forward.

One thing that I mentioned earlier was the message the movie was trying to send. Without giving everything away the movie really does try to tell a solid story of a child trying to come to grips with tragedy and loss through the lens of a fantasy tale. Sometimes it is effective but more often than not it falls flat with the wooden performances, bad animation, and the soundless sound mix. It really did have an opportunity to nail that but it missed.

Conclusion:

Although the film had its problems (I’ve mentioned several) I really do think this is a movie that kids will enjoy. That’s the point anyway I’m sure, talking animals and two young folks off on an adventure through the hole in their floor. For me, the best part of the film was a talking two-headed turtle, that I know kids will get into because it is funny. It’s a bit odd that the two heads (that share a body) are married but that’s neither here nor there. I still feel like the entire thing should have been animated because that would have erased many of the immersion problems I was having.

If you have kids, you might as well give this a shot, if, for no other reason than to see the turtle I’m talking about, it was fantastic. Also, there are two plot twists (that you can smell ten miles away) that I won’t ruin now and plot twists are always fun… usually. This kind of falls flat but still almost leaves you with a smile right at the end, something I wasn’t sure was going to come from The Secret Kingdom. I feel like if there was a little more money and a little more time and a little more care is given, this could have been something special.


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