**1/2 (out of ****)
Featuring the voices of Matt Damon, Drew Barrymore, Bill Pullman, Nathan Lane, Janeane Garofalo, Ron Perlman, and John Leguizamo
Directed by Don Bluth and Gary Goldman & written by Hans Bauer, Randall McCormick, Ben Edlund, John August, and Joss Whedon
2000
94 min PG
The animated adventure “Titan A.E.” is one of those movies like “Tron” or “Legend” that looks simply wonderful but is powered by a story that is not equal to its visuals. The movie is primarily the work of El Paso native Don Bluth, the man behind “All Dogs Go to Heaven,” “The Secret of NIMH,” and “Anastasia,” and while working for Walt Disney was an animator for “Cinderella” and “Winnie the Pooh.” Here he has combined his traditional hand-drawn character animation with computer-generated spaceships and backgrounds that are utterly amazing. But the story behind all this is not so much bad as it is forgettable and unremarkable. At the three-quarter mark, my wife and I just gave up and began calling scenes and even lines of dialogue before they happened.
But this is one good looking flick. Set a thousand years in the future, an alien race called the Dredge has destroyed Earth and scattered humanity throughout the cosmos. We get all manner of improbable spacecraft, from the eerily beautiful Dredge, who seem to be comprised of pure blue energy, to the ramshackle floating rust-buckets of humanity. Major settings include a hellish planet of red ocean and bulbous trees, to a ring of ice crystals floating in outer space. The latter sequence is so jaw-dropping that a friend of mine speculates that it single-handedly bankrupted 20th Century Fox Animation. Chases and narrow-escapes in these places involve razor-sharp snowflakes the size of skyscrapers, and creatures that combine bats with priests. All this is set before stars, nebulae, and miscellaneous space clouds, all sharply, clearly, and elegantly drawn, all beautiful in the limitless black sky.
Linking these awesome sights is a run-of-the-mill race between the Dredge and a group of human survivors for the McGuffin that will save mankind. The hero is a young man (voiced by Matt Damon) who has lost faith in humanity, who is joined by a rag-tag bunch of misfits, a love interest he catches coming out of the shower, and has issues with his father’s legacy…blah blah blah, “you’re even more like your father than I thought!” Humanity’s last hope is, of course, a blonde-haired white guy. When we see him first as a young boy, he’s a total Movie Child, i.e. he is always staring in wide-eyed wonder at everything and saying “wow!” Real children are seldom like this at all; because they have no frame of reference as to what is “normal” they have no idea what they should find impressive. This is why when you give them a toy they play with the box. Anyway, everyone is buff, poured into their clothes, and the love interest (voiced by Drew Barrymore) has hips that are…I dunno. The voice acting is not the best I’ve heard, probably because “Titan A.E.” is not cast with professional voice actors but with movie stars, in the hope that big name recognition would boost ticket sales. Which it did not. John Legiuzamo voices a bumbling scientist-type, who comes out of the movie with perhaps its only quotable line, about a device he created in his sleep and whose purpose he cannot possibly comprehend.
I just learned that “Dredge” is a misspelling. It should be “Drej.” Far out.
This is obviously a movie that was pitched by artwork and not by a screenplay. The beautifully rendered setpieces and action sequences probably came first and a script was tailored to them. In the movie’s defense, “Titan A.E.” moves at a good clip and is not full of itself. The characters themselves are not especially likeable or unlikeable in their bland, archetypal way, and they certainly aren’t offensive. The movie’s dialogue, provided by a jillion writers, with “Buffy” writer Joss Whedon among them, is cheesy without knowing it’s cheesy. And things are not helped by the rock-star soundtrack, featuring the hottest bands from 1999 you haven’t heard from since, although there are ten more now that sound just like them.
But here’s the hard part: can I make a blanket recommendation for “Titan A.E.” based solely on the success of its visuals? The movies have always been more about images, sweeping emotions, and the subtextual meanings behind them than about a particular film’s stated ideas. If you prefer ideas and stories, go first to the library, not the movie theater. To use the same yardstick for novels and movies would be like weighing books and paintings by the same criteria. What I mean is, you wouldn’t condemn a beautiful painting just because it’s based on a stupid story, would you? But movies are the children of both paint and the page, and as such are beholden to both of them. In the grand balance of these things, the purely cinematic elements must hold more sway than those shared by other media. The question is not “do the visuals redeem the clunky story?” but “does the clunky story distract too much from the images?” In the case of “Titan A.E.,” I’m really not sure.
Finished February 11th, 2004
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