Early Man has a sweet premise
At the dawn of civilisation there were dinosaurs, cavemen and, apparently, football.
Directed by Nick Park, Early Man is a fun family-friendly film about the clash of two competing ages, stone and bronze, and a fight to reclaim one’s home in a battle on the field, in the game we call football.
Prior to introducing us to the film’s main character Dug (voiced by Eddie Redmayne) the film shows an incident of a giant asteroid falling down to earth and killing all dinosaurs, but providing fertile land for human settlement. These early men find debris from the asteroid too hot to handle and kick it around until becomes an enjoyable game we all know as football.
It’s a sweet premise which seems both simple and silly, perhaps alluding to the timelessness of football and simplicity of the game as to be enjoyed by all ages and groups. Whether an association between primitive cavemen and the origin of football is something to be applauded, any criticism or doubt is quickly quenched by the quirky characters featured in this film.
Early Man centres around Dug and his tribe; cavemen who live a simple life of hunting rabbits in the valley. Upon the arrival of a Bronze army led by a pompous Lord Nooth (Tom Hiddleston), the tribe are driven out of the valley and into the badlands where giant ducks roam and the cavemen are made to fend for themselves. Events lead to Dug challenging Lord Nooth and the Bronze team to a football match in order to win back their valley or end up serving in the mines.
Dug’s sidekick, a pet boar named Hognog (Nick Park) provides another element of comic relief in the film, serving as the voice of reason when contrasted with an idealistic Dug and his simple minded tribe who set out to play football with no prior experience. Thankfully they meet Goona (Maisie Williams), a local resident of the Bronze city who helps train the stone age team after being resentful for not being able to play football because of Bronze city’s exclusion of women players.
In Early Man you can expect to see the well-known stop-motion clay animation techniques Aardman Animation is known for, characters with painted glass eyes, crooked toothy grins, and over the top personalities. With a well known British cast voicing the characters, including Richard Ayoade playing Treebor, a socially inept giant, and Timothy Spall as Bobnar, chief of the valley, Early Man feels familiar to many audiences who like me would have grown up watching Aardman Animations.
More than just a kid’s football film, Early Man contains references to football evident throughout with the feature of a football game, giant foam hands, arrogant overpaid players and overpriced merchandise. The film seems to reference incidents of corruption in football or sports in general and parallels can also be made between the forced removal of the cavemen from their home and the urbanisation of rural land for privatisation and profit.
The forced removal of the Stone Age tribe from the valley serves as the catalyst for the film’s main plot, in sum a football game, but underlying are themes of females in sport, corruption, greed, and themes of colonisation from a supposedly more advanced civilisation that run throughout.
Suitable for all ages, I found Early Man to be highly enjoyable with its quirky characters and script that centres around football and contains sports references that even I was able to catch. Whilst I’m not the biggest sports fan, I was able to understand the film’s reference to the importance of being part of a team and standing up for what you believe in.
Early Man is released nationally around Australia on April 12. It’s already out in other parts of the world.
Review by Addy Fong.
