Okay, triad against Pixar's poor decision-making over... Onto Epic.
It's about a 6.5/10. It's not bad, just not really good. It's fun in parts, but also rather stupid in others...
Some may recall my love of Rio, which had a surprisingly good love story, and characters that had good qualities while still being comedic.
This does not really apply here...
Epic's characters are all bland. We got a bumbling professor, a down-to-earth teenage girl, a reckless speedster, a serious general, a loving queen, dumb comedy relief, one-note villain... The characters aren't interesting...
The story is pretty standard as well; basic chase after a MacGuffin (trope name for a plot relevant noun), fight the bad guy, bad guy gets swallowed by a tree. (No, seriously. He dies by tree growth. This is a CG movie and, amazingly enough, that looked really weird and fake. Wrap your head around that...)
And the voice acting... Why were big-name actors hired to do the voices? Why did the queen (by the way, love the fact it was a queen instead of a princess) have to be Beyonce, and why did a bit-part mafia toad have to be played by Pitbull? Colin Firth was okay as Rhonin, but it was somehwat standard acting, nothing really to write home about... You know something is wrong when I mention the actors; I never care about the actors!
If you have children in need of entertainment, it is a good enough movie. If you're an animation fan, go see it in 3D, I hear the imagery is at least good; maybe get the movie's soundtrack and listen to that while the movie is playing and ignore the story altogether.
As for how I would improve the story... One idea is to make the main human girl be the one who is interested in the tiny forest people, cut out the father and family story altogether. Then while small she could be gushing about how amazing it all is, basically fangirling it up. But, while she's doing that, make her Awesome By Analysis. She can be silly and a little goofy, but she should be able to fight the bad guys and learn the mechanics of their world fairly quickly; IE, she should be able to learn to fly a hummingbird and jump insanely high fairly quickly, and be effective in fighting. Basically think if Jar Jar Binks lost his clumsiness and became a Jedi.
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| You know The Phantom Menace would be the number one Star Wars film if Jar Jar was awesome. |
Also, remove all other comedy relief characters. The main character girl will more than make up for the loss of the slugs, and then some. (By the way BlueSky, the comedy relief characters sort of worked in Rio, but that's because more emphasis was put on the main characters; don't overdo the comedy relief, otherwise you are relieving us from comedy with comedy.)
Finally, make the villain represent something different. In the movie, he represents rot and decay... which are a part of life, and feed regrowth. He should be more of an ally then an enemy, removing dead things to make room for newer things... like a garbage man. One could instead make him a rival kingdom of the forest, vying for control. It could be that he wishes to remove the beauty of the forest and make it harsh and cold so that it may survive better, while the heroes want to it have beauty and freedom, at the risk of destruction. That is a philosophical disagreement there worth fighting over (wars have been fought for less).
Other than that, stop hiring celebrity voice actors. get actual actors to do the voices, or, even better, get Voice actors and actresses to do it. (Cree Summer, who has done work in voice acting for over 200 titles, including TV, Movies, and video games, doing the voice work for Susie of the Rugrats and Foxxy Love of Drawn Together, would've done a significantly better job at voicing the queen, than Beyonce.)
This has been Fixer Sue.
Oh, one more thing...
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| Imagine him as Anakin Skywalker. |
...You really want a remake of the Phantom Menace now, don't you?
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