Reviews & Ratings for
Captain Fantastic (2016)

Ben Cash and his wife Leslie and their six children live in the Washington wilderness. Ben and Leslie are former left-wing anarchist activists disillusioned with capitalism and American life, who chose to instill survivalist skills, left-wing politics, and philosophy in their children—educating them to think critically, training them to be self-reliant, physically fit and athletic, guiding them without technology, demonstrating the beauty of coexisting nature and celebrating Noam Chomsky's birthday instead of Christmas.

Leslie is hospitalized for bipolar disorder and eventually dies by suicide. Ben learns that Leslie's father, Jack, plans to hold a traditional funeral and burial, even though Leslie wished to be cremated. They argue over the phone and Jack threatens to have Ben arrested if he attends the funeral. He initially decides not to go and prevents his children from doing so, but then changes his mind, leading his children on a road trip into life outside the wilderness.

The family briefly stays at the house of Ben’s sister Harper. She and her husband try to convince Ben that his children should attend school to receive a conventional education; Ben shows that his children are better educated than Harper's own children. Ben arrives at Leslie's funeral with his children and reads her will, which instructs her family to cremate her and flush her ashes down the toilet. In response, Jack has Ben forcibly removed.

Ben's children also start doubting their father and his parenting skills. His son Rellian accuses Ben of failing to treat Leslie's mental health. His son Bodevan accuses his father of failing to equip them for the real world by setting them up for a rude awakening when they grow up and shows him college acceptance letters from Ivy League schools for which Leslie had helped him apply. Rellian wants to live with his grandparents, who want to take custody of him. When Ben's daughter Vespyr tries to climb into a window to "free" Rellian from his grandparents, she falls from the roof and narrowly avoids breaking her neck. Ben, shocked and guilty, allows Jack to take his children. Although they have bonded with their grandparents, the children decide to follow Ben again when he departs.

The children honor Leslie's wish and convince Ben to help them, exhuming her corpse, burning it in a self-made pyre and flushing her ashes down an airport toilet. Bodevan then leaves the family to travel through Namibia, while the rest settle on a farm. The final scene shows the family around the kitchen table with their father, waiting for the school bus to arrive.

Captain Fantastic is a movie that will be best loved by those who liked Into The Wild. It is a story about a couple who decide to raise their kids in the wilderness away from civilisation. But when the mother loses her life to a fatal disease the whole family is thrown into a turmoil. They are now forced to engage with the society from which they had so long been fiercely shielded.

Captain Fantastic is a satire that shows a mirror to the society and calls out the numerous wrongs prevalent in the society, yet at the same time affirms the need for a society, a community to exist within. Viggo Mortenson, who we all know from the Lord of the Rings series, plays the patriarch of the family and delivers a powerful performance. The child actors playing his children too deliver splendid performances to match the adults. The cinematography is great and the costumes are note worthy for all the bright and outlandish dashes of colours giving the characters a unique look that visually separates them from the usual mundane society. Music too has been well utilised and the cover of Sweet Child-o-mine in the end of the movie is a cherry on a delicious cake.

A rusty trash can crammed with every single Sundance convention Me and Earl and the Dying Girl didn't already cover. A mean-spirited, offensive, hamfisted assault to its core audience's senses that would make even Tom Hooper kneel down and beg for mercy. A study of characters so unlikeable and formulaic that not even by the end can any sympathy be felt for them no matter how hard it tries. One of the baitiest, most typical, most insufferable piles of dreck ever to pander to any filmmaking race other than the Oscars. Bad parenting/filmmaking 101.

Think before calling your shit "Fantastic".

Captain Fantastic may have been my favorite film of Sundance 2016. Viggo Mortenson is a home schooling father with six children in the wilderness forest somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. The film opens with him teaching his oldest son to hunt a deer by making him kill it with only a knife and wrestling it to the ground. The young actor who plays the oldest son was amazing. The family must leave their forest home to attend a funeral, and the children come to realize how isolated they are from the real material world, and how they may have book knowledge, but they don't know how to interact with other people outside the family. The oldest son wants to go away to college, but fears his father's reaction.

Viggo is the only person I can imagine in this role. He is exceptional. All the kids are fantastic, and have great chemistry together and with Viggo.