Brad Bird's Long-Gestating Jetpack Noir: Immersive, and Too Sprawling

Brad Bird, the filmmaker and animator behind The Iron Giant and The Incredibles, has been kicking this project around for decades: a jetpack-powered detective story that IndieWire frames as noir meeting Blade Runner. Reviewing the finished film, the outlet calls the result immersive but too sprawling — two verdicts that are less contradictory than they look. Immersion and sprawl come from the same source: density. A world built up over years feels lived-in precisely because so much has been added to it, and the same accumulation can leave a story without a clear centre to tighten around. That is the recurring risk of the passion project that gestates for a long time; no one is cutting it down to what a schedule would have allowed. A retro-futurist noir is also a specific bet — a future that never arrived, offered as a place where a detective can still work. Whether the sprawl is a failure of that bet or the price of taking it seriously is the question the review leaves hanging. One critic's assessment is not a verdict on Bird's body of work, but it is a clear-eyed read of where the ambition landed.