A young boy in the distant future travels through time before he’s ready and ends up in an earlier future. A young girl in the near future is alone with her baby brother and housekeeping robot servant. Everything’s boring in her life until the time traveler crashes at her doorstep. Now she and the boy become friends as they try to figure out how to send him back to the future.
You’ll Understand When You’re Older
Arco is a 10-year-old boy from the distant future who lives with his parents and older sister. In this distant future, he and his family live like the Jetsons, up on a tree-like platform where his house is. It’s apparent that everyone in his community is a time traveller, travelling through time to find and secure extinct ecological life that could help them sustain their present situation. Nothing is really explained about their situation, nor as to why their law requires any citizen to be at least 12 years of age to be allowed to time travel. So, like any impatient young boy, he steals his sister’s flight suit, the jewel that I believe is the conduit that the user focuses on to travel to the time and place they want to go to, and leaps off his homestead and into his unknown journey.
Ask, and You Shall Receive
Iris, the same age as Arco, lives in the near future with her little brother Peter and housekeeping and questionably permanent nanny robot Mikki while the kids’ parents are away on business. Iris, with her limited function robot companion, and parents that are little more than holograms than parenting figures, her life as a 10 year old is very cut and dry: nothing to do but follow the rules, everything is self-sufficient and automated down to the protective domes placed over everyone’s domicile as protection for the seemingly very routine environmental disasters like hurricanes quickly followed by forest fires.
Again, no inclination as to why those things happen so habitually that they require such protection, it’s just the world they live in. Clean, efficient, and dull as can be, it’s no wonder Iris dreams of a different life. Her prayers are soon answered when Arco comes crashing into a nearby forest and into her monotonous life.
“These Children are Under My Care”
Mikki, by far, is one of the most devoted servant droids we’ve seen since Iggy from Ergo Proxy. An older model compared to the other more rank-and-file suits we see throughout the film, and is voiced by both, yes, both Natalie Portman and Mark Ruffalo, who also voice Iris’s mother and father, respectively. The consensus is that because of their physical absence, Iris’s parents must’ve programmed Mikki to act like both as well as sound like both parenting figures while they’re away. Because it’s an older model and programmed to be like a parent, its independence from the rules of the average automaton is how it managed to save both Iris and Arco from certain dangers up until the end. Even its final act before its ‘deactivation’ showed a very human instinct: to preserve its memories, which ended up saving the children one last time.
Time Travel: It Just Works
Arco’s flight suit is powered via the simulation of a rainstorm, which somehow makes sense since when the wearer takes flight, it creates a rainbow. What doesn’t make sense is that its power is separate from the power gem adorned on the time traveller’s forehead. It grants the wearer the power of time travel, my guess is by just thinking of a time and place mid-flight, and the traveller will be whisked away there in an instant. Arco, not being old enough to time travel, donning his sister’s suit and gem, and propelling himself into the unknown, clearly proves he was not ready. Now that he’s with Iris, they try to simulate a rainstorm with the use of lawn sprinklers. Again, not the most thought-out planning for a couple of 10-year-olds, but hey, that’s just science that never gets explained in this film, it’s just accepted for what it is.
Too Much Drama, Not Enough Drama
The parallels of dubbing the film from French to English felt rather bizarre in Arco. In French, it would’ve made more sense how the characters communicated with each other, which made them more flamboyant and expressive. But when translated to English, it was like the characters made their point across very quickly, but then kept talking. And that talking quickly turned into unnecessary yelling or insulting. The Triplets, for example, Dougie, Stewie, and Frankie, had their rapport with each other that, when translated to English, seemed over the top, like they had said more than they needed to in order to get their point across.
Robots, or rather, the replacements of the majority of the adults in the community in Iris’s timeline. These surrogate figures of authority, from school teachers to firefighters and police officers, never reached their full potential as the ideal apocalyptic machine that inevitably gains self-awareness and takes over the human race. I suppose in a way it was the most unpredictable twist in one of the most predictable situations of a doomsday scenario; the robots didn’t rebel against their human masters, they stayed obedient to the humans and their limited programming.
Ugo Bienvenu
Ugo Bienvenu is a writer, director, and producer based in France who has directed mainly animated shorts such as Jean-Luc (2010), Une île (2012), Maman (2013), and was a co-director for the Ant-Man TV Mini Series (2017). His star average on IMDb has been a modest 6/10, with Arco sadly enough reaching that same rating.
It’s Just Okay
Arco’s family traveled all through time to find him and bring him home is a lovely sentiment. Any doting parent would’ve done the same. What they’ve neglected to show is the obvious fact that they’re all time travellers. They didn’t need to traverse through all of time, just go back to the exact moment right before Arco left and stop him. That’s fine, perhaps show that part at the end of the movie, but they didn’t do that either.
There were so many more questions than there were answers at the end, like: what was the significant change between Iris’s timeline versus Arco’s timeline? The bubbles that encased each person’s homes acted as a safety feature for the environmental hazards like hurricanes and wildfires. Why were there so many hurricanes and wildfires to begin with? How did the timeline change so dramatically from robot servants to living like the Jetsons with their homes in the clouds, trying to regrow plants that were lost to time? As this writer has stated, this movie is just okay if the audience focuses only on the two main characters and nothing else. Don’t focus too heavily on the rules of time travel, and the youthful romance of the film should be just fine.
Writer’s Full Disclosure
Please don’t take this writer’s words too much to heart, or that I’m judging this film way too harshly. I went in virtually blind to the film without watching the trailer or doing any research whatsoever. My points are valid for what was presented to me in the theater only. I am not in any way intentionally saying that the film was bad, it’s just that the context of the film was severely lacking, which, I believe, could have been better.
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