Six-String Theoryĭespite no shortage of hilarious dialogue options, Francis isn’t on an intergalactic journey just to chat, and indeed outside of a couple of key hub areas The Artful Escape mostly lets his fingers do the talking. The perpetually baffled but always endearingly enthused performance of Francis himself, voiced by Teen Wolf’s Michael Johnston, served as the perfect foil to the contrasting eccentricities of each oddball character I encountered.
My favourite of them all was Francis’ musical mentor, Lightman, a cross between Chuck Berry and Doc Brown who’s voiced with real verve by ‘80s action star Carl Weathers. Over the course of the ensuing four-hour rock opera I met an assortment of fantastically flamboyant interstellar beings, from a likeably carefree cosmic entity voiced by Game of Thrones’ Lena Headey, to an extraterrestrial jazz club owner who only speaks in saxophone. It’s his character of Zomm, effectively a floating brain in a jar from outer space, who visits Francis in the middle of the night, equips him with a holographic guitar and matching Tron jumpsuit, and sends him on his first interplanetary steps toward his transformation from awkward coffee shop shoegazer to Ziggy Stardust-like musical trailblazer. who just happens to be voiced by Jason Schwartzman.
The Artful Escape doesn’t just feature the striking lateral camera tracking shots and delightfully deadpan line delivery from the likes of The Grand Budapest Hotel or The Darjeeling Limited, it also features a wonderfully offbeat Jason Schwartzman-style character. The sense of catharsis is palpable as you ‘press X to shred a sci-fi guitar odyssey’ during The Artful Escape’s opening moments and rip some hot licks on a hilltop that make the Rocky Mountains rock even harder.įrom there, it felt as though I’d been whisked away into the pleasantly peculiar inside of a Wes Anderson film, albeit one with substantially more aliens. He isn’t turned on by the humdrum of the humble strum for him, the best tonic is a freshly shredded pentatonic. With the shadow of his successful folk singing uncle looming large over his nascent musical career, Francis struggles with the stress of trying to be something he’s not as he prepares to make his onstage debut at a musical festival in his hometown of Calypso, Colorado. Although it features numerous beasts from other worlds to confront along the way, the major villain in The Artful Escape takes the form of a demon that I found far more relatable than any evil alien threat Francis’ own sense of self doubt.
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