It was a holiday last Monday, so we were free to go to the zoo with our latest guest, Austine. Unfortunately it rained really hard, so we decided to watch a movie in the cinema instead. It was my first time to watch a movie in a cinema in Singapore because for 10 Sing dollars a movie, I wanted to reserve the cinema only for movies that are truly worth it. And so we walked towards Cathay Cineplex in Orchard, my platform slippers skidding on the wet sidewalks along the way. We gave the choice of movie to the guest. He chose Bolt over all the other movies showing.
An hour later, we were seated at the second row of the cold movie house, only one nationality in a room filled with at least three others. I wondered how different races would react to the same movie. Back in Metro Manila, I liked going to Ayala cinemas because I would be at the same thought waves with the audience – that is, I found that we would laugh out loud at the same moments and generally had the same reactions as compared to SM cinema audiences, where I usually found myself laughing alone at moments I found hilarious and cringing at the corniness of scenes that the others would guffaw at. I was even more apprehensive about the wavelength thing now that I was with an entirely different audience altogether.
The story of Bolt opens with a scene from a pound, where a cute white puppy wrestles with a squeaky toy carrot inside a kennel. A girl looking for a pup to adopt comes in and chooses him, snapping a collar around his neck bearing his name, Bolt.
10 years later, the girl, Penny, is talking to her dad on her cellphone. He has been kidnapped, he says, but she will not be in danger because he has reengineered her pet so that he can protect her. Bolt now bears a lightning streak on his side, and as Penny is pursued by some bad guys, he protects her using his new powers of superstrength, heat vision, and of course, the superbark. At the end of the day, he defeats all their pursuers and Penny thanks him for saving her again.
Just when you’re blown away by the concept, you do a double take when the real story spills out in the words of another character:
“You’re missing everything, Mindy. You see a dog. I see an animal that believes with every fiber of his being, every fiber… that the girl he loves is in mortal danger. I see a depth of emotion on the face of that canine the likes of which has never been captured on screen before. Never, Mindy From The Network. We jump through hoops to make sure Bolt believes everything is real. It’s why we don’t miss marks. It’s why we don’t reshoot.”
So Bolt is like the canine version of The Truman Show, in that he is part of a TV show where everyone but the leading man – or dog – is acting. The story takes a twist when Bolt escapes his trailer and accidentally gets shipped off to New York, where he finds, to his consternation, that his “powers” no longer work. But he is still as determined as ever to rescue his person, Penny. In a real world where he is subject to hunger and bleeding, he gets by with a little help from Missy the alley cat and Rhino the hamster.
The movie is comparable to Cars or The Incredibles at the humor level, and since the entire cinema was roaring with laughter, I suppose it’s safe to assume that it’s funny not just for me and my friends, but for a lot of people – and races – as well. But it was not without poignant scenes. A tear trickled down my cheek when Missy tried to convince Bolt that all humans, including Penny, did not really love their pets, saying,
“They pretend they’re going to always be there for you, and then one day they pack up and move away and take their love with them, and leave their declawed cat to fend for herself! They leave her, wondering what she did wrong.”
[Sniff.] Despite that, Bolt still journeys to find his person, and proves that she’s not like Missy’s owners… Penny does love him, and not just any other dog. When she nearly dies, he saves her with a for real superbark. [Sniff sniff.]
So my verdict? It was well worth 10 bucks. I’ve never been more glad that it rained.