| TITAN A.E. |
 2000
- USADirectors: Don Bluth, Gary Goldman, Art Vitello - Reviewed by Robert
What are the critics raving about? The reason I paid to see this movie was because of the great reviews I'd read which made me think, maybe there's more to it than the previews let on. I hoped that it would be at least a run-of-the-mill sci-fi adventure—maybe even above average. It certainly had an intriguing premise: Earth is destroyed by aliens who are "afraid of what humanity might become" but a mysterious ship, the Titan, which apparently holds that frightening potential, manages to escape and hide somewhere in the vastness of space. Indeed, I'm hooked. But in the theater it opens like an after-school TV cartoon with a boy more concerned about his toy than about the evacuation of Earth. All the adults speak with urgency, but act like they have plenty of time to chatter and supply exposition for the audience's sake. And from there the film spirals into a vacuum. The dialogue tells us that humans are scum and universally hated, but they don't seem any worse off anyone else. We're told that the alien Drej hate and fear humans for a reason, but that reason never materializes. We're told that our heroes are in constant danger, but apart from the action sequences there's no threat and no sense of urgency—or even of purpose, for the most part. In fact, I wondered if they hadn't systematically removed the most interesting parts of the story—those that develop the premise and the characters—in order to shave it down to it's 94-minute running time. The whole story felt like the script had been written according to a formula: so many action sequences spaced so many minutes apart, with character development at this and that point, betrayal and redemption at the climax… yawn… and don't forget the love story and spunky/quirky non-human characters. A sequence in which Cale (Damon) and Akima (Barrymore) get captured and then rescued is so telegraphic and pointless that I wonder why they included it, unless the scriptwriting manual said "throw in an obstacle on page 43 of the script." Late in the film, there's a character who desperately tries to explain his actions which clearly served a necessary twist in the plot rather than the character established over the last hour. The press has also lauded the animation and special effects, but I've seen basically the same thing on TV, just on a smaller screen. Sometimes, as in the destruction of Earth, the computer generated images so clashed with the traditionally animated images that I winced. What makes it really bad is that the points so conspicuously absent are exactly those which could have made Titan A.E. a fine film. A touch of development for the characters, some pacing and flow in the plot, and most of all some interesting development of the premise of the Titan ship itself and the Noah's Ark allusion—especially in relation to the fears and motivations of the Drej—could have lifted this to be a film worth watching. As it is, it insulted the intelligence even of the middle-schoolers in the audience with me. Their final comment: "That sucked." |
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