Well-thumbed playbook produces few wonders
things a step further, causing chaos in the neighbourhood by enlisting the help of her school friends to create a real-life, health and safety nightmare of a rollercoaster.
But while she only ends up with ‘‘a raspberry on her elbow’’, the trail of destruction leads some community elders to suggest that military school is the only place for her. However, June’s parents love their ‘‘adorable lunatic of a daughter’’, happy just to suggest to her that she needs to be a little more ‘‘practical and safe’’.
It isn’t long though before a new threat to Wonderland looms.
Sickness forces June’s mother out of the house to seek specialised medical treatment. Terrified, June goes into an obsessive compulsive overdrive, deciding that she needs to put away childish things. Little does she know that her actions have everyone from Boomer the Welcome Bear to Steve the Safety Officer – and Peanut – fearing for their future.
Notable for being a rare cinematic release not to have a credited director (the original helmer, Pixar veteran Dyan Brown, was allegedly fired for ‘‘inappropriate and unwanted conduct’’), Wonder Park is solid, but unspectacular school holiday entertainment.
While the girl-creates-themepark premise produces some magnificent and intricate candycoloured creations, there’s precious little originality on display. The ‘‘darkness’’ threatening Wonderland is a threat straight out of The Neverending Story and A Wrinkle in Time playbook, while June’s journey into the inner reaches of the park reminded this adult of a kids’ version of Vincent Ward’s What Dreams May Come.
Even a ‘‘splendiferous’’ montage of mother-daughter moments feels like a lesser version of Up’s famous heartbreaker.
Likewise, while the writing trio do a good job of never letting the pace flag, their characters feel somewhat one-dimensional, with even the likes of John Oliver, Ken Jeong and Mila Kunis unable to make them truly memorable.
Seemingly destined to find a second life as a Nickelodeon television series, as a big-screen outing, Wonder Park offers mildly diverting fun. Soldiers Without Guns (M, 92 mins) Directed by Will Watson Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★★
Bougainville spent a century being passed around like a gambling chip. It was at various times occupied and ruled by England (which separated the archipelago from the Solomons, with which Bougainville had previously been one nation), Germany, Japan, Australia and then Papua New Guinea.
Sometime in the 1960s, the people of Bougainville had the great misfortune to discover they were living on top of an immense amount of copper ore.
The eye of the giant Rio Tinto corporation – which has turned up as the bad guy in movies in two consecutive weeks – swivelled across the globe and engines of capitalism roared into life.
Soon, Bougainville was the nonplussed host of the world’s biggest hole (this is official – it was in The Guinness Book of Records) and an explosion of the unrest that always results when massive amounts of capital are poured unequally into an economy.
The first protests against the mining operation were met by armed police and soldiers acting on behalf of the Papua government, which was now a functionary of Rio Tinto in Bougainville.
The men of Bougainville became factionalised, the violence escalated and the mostly white Australian engineers went home.
With the mine shut, the Papua forces left and the country spiralled into a brutal civil war that, over a decade, killed 20,000. That’s onesixth of the entire population.