Slumberland tells the story of Nemo, a young girl who lives with her father in a lighthouse. Nemo’s father is a great storyteller who tells Nemo the story of her adventures. After her father goes missing at sea, Nemo is taken in by her uncle Philip, who leads a lonely and boring life in the big city. Nemo is then sent to a prison-like school to adjust to her city life.
Eager to return to her lighthouse, Nemo begins dreaming of her own life before her father died. She meets Flip, a guide to Slumberland. Flip and Nemo go in search of a magical pearl that grants wish.
The fantastical world of dreams proves to be predictably fertile territory for an extravagant adventure for kids in Netflix’s big-budget big bet Slumberland, an imaginative and mostly agreeable adaptation of an early 20th-century comic strip centered around the character of Little Nemo. Created by cartoonist Winsor McCay, Nemo would find himself visiting bold and surreal new worlds in his sleep and here we meet him as her, newcomer Marlow Barkley, living in a lighthouse on a remote island with her father, played by Kyle Chandler.
Director Francis Lawrence, best known for commandeering the majority of the Hunger Games series, is a canny and confident tour guide, ushering us from one strange set-piece to the next as Nemo follows in her dream-travelling father’s footsteps after his death. She’s forced to live with her estranged uncle (Chris O’Dowd) and forced out of her untenable family home. In her dreams she meets Flip (Jason Momoa), someone her father used to travel with in his sleep, and he tells her of a myth, a pearl that would allow her to control her dreams, and the two embark on a quest to find it.
The rambunctious quest involves drifting through the dreams of others, a dangerous gambit as while dying in one’s own dream bears no impact on reality, dying in someone else’s leads to real world fatality. In the breathless, and often exhausting, first act we’re fed a great many of these rules, an ungainly exposition dump so overloaded that we feel as if we should be taking notes. But once we’re fully immersed and some air is allowed to circulate, there’s spirited fun to be had as we glide along with the pair. With so much money to play with, Lawrence treats us to an inventive digital buffet of expensive oddities, from a salsa dance made up of butterflies to a city of glass skyscrapers.
