Subject: Review: Titan A.E. (2000)

From: Christopher Null <[email-masked]>
Date: 9 Jun 2000 16:21:41 GMT

TITAN A.E.
                    A film review by Christopher Null
                      Copyright 2000 filmcritic.com
                             filmcritic.com

     Good Will Hunting goes to space in Titan A.E., an ill-conceived and
overambitious animation blowout (courtesy of 20th Century Fox) that
makes recent Disney fare look like thinking men's movies.

     Matt Damon's voice stars as Cale, an eager-beaver twentysomething
in the year 3028 who would be just like any other next-millennium Gen
made of pure energy, natch -- have blown up the earth.

     Talk about a bummer!  Cale's scientist father has vanished along
with his mysterious "Titan" spaceship project, and Cale seems doomed to
life on a crummy salvage station.  But in walks renegade space dude
Korso (Bill Pullman) to rescue Cale from his life of welding, convincing
the lad to go on a quest to find the Titan before the Drej do... and
thus save all of humanity!

     A bit of Independence Day and a lot of Star Trek 2: The Wrath of
Khan, Titan A.E. owes so much of its plot to other movies that I'll be
surprised if a copyright infringement lawsuit isn't slapped down any day
now.  Not that an "homage" can't be fun, even good from time to time,
but unfortunately, Titan is so unoriginal and lackluster in its script
and plotting that it really drags you down.

     With animated fare, really crack visuals tend to outweigh asinine
plots (though they didn't in Disney's recent Dinosaur nor in Fox's last
big animation attempt, Anastasia).  While Titan's spacescapes are often
out of this world (no pun intended), the character animation slapped on
top of them is wretched; an old-style, Scooby Doo-looking bunch of
people slapped atop the background of a dystopian future is just not a
good idea.

     But while the animated people are only so-so, it's the cast of
animated creatures that really look pathetic.  As this is a Don Bluth
production, one expects there to be a talking menagerie.  In Titan, this
means talking space hyenas, talking space turtles, and a horribly
ill-conceived talking space kangaroo/vulture inexplicably and
embarrassingly voiced by Janeane Garofalo.  Altogether, precious few of
the other voices in this movie match their characters.  While Damon and
Cale are clearly doppelgangers, the whiny Pullman as the
rough-and-tumble Korso is laughable, and Drew Barrymore as the vaguely
Asian Akima is simply perplexing.

     In fact, everything about Titan is just plain strange, from the
80s-ish hard rock/power ballad soundtrack that thumps through the whole
movie to the fact that the characters can move around in zero-gravity by
"swimming" through the air.  Rock on, Will.

RATING:  **

|------------------------------|
 \ ***** Perfection             \
  \ **** Good, memorable film    \
   \ *** Average, hits and misses \
    \ ** Sub-par on many levels    \
     \ * Unquestionably awful       \
      |------------------------------|

MPAA Rating: PG

Director: Don Bluth, Gary Goldman
Producer: Don Bluth, Gary Goldman, David Kirschner
Writer: Ben Edlund, Randall McCormick, Joss Whedon
Starring: Matt Damon, Drew Barrymore, Bill Pullman, Nathan Lane, Tone
Loc, Jim Breuer, Janeane Garofalo, John Leguizamo, Ron Perlman, Alex D.
Linz

http://www.afterearth.com/home.html

<A
HREF="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=filmcriticcom&path=subst/video/sellers/amazon-top-100-dvd.html">
Movie Fiends: Check out Amazon.com's Top 100 Hot DVDs!</A>

To unsubscribe from filmcritic.com's Breaking Reviews mailing list,
reply to this e-mail with UNSUBSCRIBE as the subject.  E-mail address
changes via reply with both old and new addresses.