'Moonrise Kingdom' movie review

Now I wasn't exactly planning to see this movie, but I had an opportunity, so I said why not. Moonrise Kingdom is a comedy-drama, directed by Wes Anderson, set in the '60s, about two weird kids named Sam and Suzy, that start writing letters, fall in love and decide to run away into the wild together, as they are basically the only ones who understand each other. That causes a local search party to go looking for them, that includes Edward Norton as a scoutmaster, Bruce Willis as a policeman and Bill Murray and Francis McDormand as Suzy's parents. The movie also stars Harvey Keitel as an another scoutmaster and Tilda Swinton as 'social services'. And now we have our movie.

Just to clarify, Moonrise Kingdom is an indie and a bit artsy comedy. As much as I prefer Hollywood comedies, I don't mind an indie one from time to time. And this one sort of brought me what I expected: a bittersweet love story with typical, but sympathic and felicitious indie-comedy jokes. What I didn't expect was the oddity. The movie has a bit of a surreal feel to it and is very odd and strange. Not strange, that's not a good word...quirky. Yes, quirky is the best word to describe this movie. But what one of the rare good cartoons on TV nowadays, Adventure Time and Regular Show prove me every week, quirky doesn't neccesarily mean bad. And in the case of this movie, not bad at all.


What I've also heard about Moonrise Kingdom is that it's a typical Wes Anderson movie and that you'll love it, if you loved his previous work. I haven't watched or heard for any of his movies (or Wes Anderson for that matter) and after I've seen this, I won't be exactly illegaly downloading every one of his previous movies, but I have to say I enyoyed this. For some reason I kept rooting for the main characters to suceed, Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward as weird, troubled and emotionally disturbed 12-yr olds are downright brilliant, the A-star support cast is very good too, the jokes are typically indie, but pretty funny and all that is backed up with an unpredictable story, lots of interesting directing tricks and good music. Also, I'm quite sure it'll get an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay.


Total rating: 7.5 / 10