Gulliver's Travels

There is a specific kind of vertigo that comes from looking at the cast list of 2010’s Gulliver’s Travels. On paper, this should be a comedy powerhouse: Jack Black at the height of his family-movie powers, Jason Segel fresh off How I Met Your Mother stardom, Emily Blunt before she became an action icon, and Chris O’Dowd just as he was becoming the internet's favorite Irishman. It is a 2010 time capsule of "actors I like," yet somehow it feels like it was beamed in from a dimension where Jonathan Swift’s biting 18th-century satire was actually just an excuse to watch a giant man play Guitar Hero.

I watched this most recently on a slightly scratched DVD while sitting in a hotel room in Des Moines, eating a bag of lukewarm pretzels that tasted faintly of cardboard. Somehow, that slightly depressing, transient atmosphere felt like the perfect way to engage with a film that is the cinematic equivalent of a loud Hawaiian shirt—colorful, comfortable, a bit tacky, and entirely unnecessary, yet you can’t help but smile at the audacity of it.

A Mailroom Odyssey in 3D

The film re-imagines Lemuel Gulliver not as a seasoned physician or traveler, but as a perennial mailroom slacker at a New York newspaper. To impress his editor/crush Amanda Peet, he plagiarizes a travel article and winds up assigned to the Bermuda Triangle. One CGI waterspout later, he wakes up on the shores of Lilliput, where everything is roughly 1/12th scale.

Technically, the film is a fascinating relic of the "Post-Avatar" 3D rush. Looking back, you can see where Rob Letterman was clearly directed to "make it big" for the 3D glasses era. The scale shots are actually quite impressive for their time—even if the CGI Jack Black looks like he’s been dropped into a very expensive miniature village. There’s a certain charm to the production design; the Lilliputian city is a marvel of tiny craftsmanship that occasionally gets stepped on by a guy who thinks Prince lyrics are profound philosophy.

The Cast of Future Legends

What keeps Gulliver’s Travels from being a total shipwreck is the sheer charisma of its ensemble. Jack Black is doing "The Jack Black Thing"—which involves high-energy riffing and eyebrow acting—but he’s surrounded by people who are taking the absurdity surprisingly seriously. Emily Blunt, as Princess Mary, brings a level of regal grace that she really shouldn't have bothered with for a movie that features a giant man putting out a palace fire with his bladder. Apparently, Blunt was actually contractually obligated by Fox to do this film, which famously forced her to turn down the role of Black Widow in Iron Man 2. Seeing her play a dainty princess while knowing she could have been suplexing aliens in the MCU adds a layer of "what if" melancholy to every scene.

Then there’s Chris O'Dowd as General Edward, the jealous villain. He is easily the best part of the movie, playing a tiny, insecure militarist with the comedic timing of a sniper. His transformation into a giant robot pilot in the third act is the kind of glorious nonsense that makes these mid-budget studio comedies feel like fever dreams. Alongside him, Jason Segel plays Horatio with a sweet, puppy-dog earnestness that balances out Jack Black's manic energy.

The Satire of the Slacker

The script, co-written by Nicholas Stoller, tries to modernize the satire by having Gulliver lie to the Lilliputians, telling them he is the President of Earth and the hero of every movie he can remember. It turns Lilliput into a bizarro version of Times Square, complete with a "G-Unit" billboard and a theater district performing "Gulliver" versions of Star Wars and Titanic.

Looking back, this feels like a very specific 2010 anxiety: the fear that our culture was becoming nothing but a shallow collection of pop-culture references. The movie accidentally becomes the very thing it’s making fun of, but there’s a weirdly sweet "cult" appeal in how dated those references are now. Seeing Jack Black teach tiny soldiers how to "Walk Like an Egyptian" is the cinematic equivalent of a Facebook "On This Day" memory you'd rather delete but find yourself staring at anyway.

Stuff You Didn't Notice

- The MCU Connection: Not only did Emily Blunt lose out on Black Widow for this, but the film’s score was composed by Henry Jackman, who would later go on to score Captain America: The Winter Soldier. - The Budget: For a 85-minute comedy, this had a staggering $112 million budget. You can see the money on screen during the naval battle scenes, which use early digital water tech that still looks surprisingly fluid. - The Soundtrack: The film features a "Lilliputian" version of "War" by Edwin Starr. It’s one of those musical numbers that feels like the director just said, "Everyone dance and we'll fix it in the edit." - The Writer's Pedigree: Nicholas Stoller wrote this right around the time he was doing Forgetting Sarah Marshall and The Muppets. You can feel his DNA in the Horatio/Princess Mary romance, which is far more charming than it has any right to be.

At the end of the day, Gulliver’s Travels is an ambitious failure that is far more watchable than its reputation suggests. It’s too short to be boring, too weird to be completely generic, and the cast is simply too talented to let the ship sink entirely. It doesn’t have the bite of the original book, but as a piece of "junk food" cinema from the turn of the digital era, it’s a fascinating, loud, and occasionally hilarious disaster. If you have 85 minutes to kill and a high tolerance for Jack Black's belly-dancing, you could do a lot worse than this tiny-world adventure.