Date seen: Sunday 15th September 2019
Venue: Showcase Cinema De Lux Southampton
I will openly admit the only reason I took my daughters to see this movie is because Eva Longoria is in it and she also produced it. I loved Desperate Housewives and everything Eva has done since, so when I heard her promoting the Dora the Explorer Movie on the Late Show it immediately went on our watch list. I’m so glad I watch the Late Show on YouTube because this was one of the best family films I’ve seen in a long time… bearing in mind my brain has been puréed by Netflix Kids!
The humour was perfectly pitched so the adults were giggling away (singing “we came together that’s the real treasure” … are you trying to make me choke on my popcorn!?) whilst the kids were transfixed by the story. And whilst no ground was broken with the plot, it was a quintessential rescue mission that was familiar to the adults, but for the children watching it for the first time it was all new and exciting. In the same way my daughters think Lego Batman is the best action film ever, they definitely think this is the best Indiana Jones movie they’ve ever seen.
But there was a moment that the film took a dark turn and there will be many audiences that wouldn’t even notice. Itwas when Dora attends an American High School for the first time and is stopped at the entrance by security staff checking students’ bags as they pass through a metal detector. The “laughs” come from the fact Dora has brought survival equipment to school which could double up as weapons and she’s so out of touch with modern society she doesn’t know she can’t bring things like that into school. There is so much wrong with this scene. And it has nothing to do with the filmmakers and is all to do with a society so broken that kids have to pass through a metal detector before they can access their education. This should not be normal and yet there we were in an afternoon cinema viewing of a movie based on a cartoon, watching children of the wealthiest country in the world being searched for weapons on their way into school.
Dora holds up the queue and as she’s explaining something mundane like the importance of iodine tablets to purify water, the bell rings and all the kids in the queue are now late. They let out a collective angry sigh and Dora is immediately the least popular kid in school.
WTF…
We had a great day out. Showcase Cinema in Southampton’s West Quay has reclining seats and there are so many places to eat and enjoy the sun nearby, I highly recommend it as a family day out. But as I tucked into my ridiculously huge gelato sundae (Sprinkles Gelateria, Below Bar) after the movie, my mind kept going back to the metal detector manned by private security staff at a school. Thoughts and prayers.
