WesternAnimation Ehm, a review of Titan AE?
I half-expected it to be childish (based on the fact that it was animated and not from Japan), but it was actually on par with most adult sci-fi. It had amazing effects, and I especially liked the Drej, now they are some awesome alien villains. I found the characters to be well-portrayed, too. Overall, it was a good movie.
-Xavius, Sci-Fi Nerd
WesternAnimation Out with a dud
You have a problem when the most revolutionary thing about your film is the way it premiered. We're supposed to care about the Earth being blown up, and although the sequence is a nice one, instead of giving us time to digest life on Earth, something that would help us care, we start at it's destruction. Then there's Cale switching from being okay with his father leaving him to not being okay with it in an instant.
The plot is kind of fast-paced, but that doesn't work to its advantage since we don't get enough time to really digest the settings. We never get a chance to properly explore them. The plot's also formulaic and not without its share of cliches.
The animation is average at best and while some 3D effects are cool (i.e. the ice rings), others are not so great and feel unfinished such as the cliffs at the end. At times the CGI can look unpleasing to the eye. The movements of the Drej look pretty clunky for menacing villains.
All the characters are stock characters, with the possible exceptions of Preed and Gune (aka "the most Bluth-y character in the movie) and they simply aren't compelling.
Cale's shift in character is invisible, and not in a good way like the cuts in Birdman. He goes from not caring about the future of the human race to actually giving a damn without anything to signal it. According to the director's commentary, it happens during his escape from the Drej mothership but there is nothing in that sequence to suggest such. Speaking of which, the reveal of Korso working for the Drej just feels random and out of place because there's nothing to suggest it before that moment. If Korso was as pessimistic and cynical as Cale initially was, why didn't he just cater to Cale's greed?
Developing upon the father/son-type of relationship Cale and Korso are supposed to have would have definitely increased the quality of the film.
The Drej are really one-dimensional villains that only get a hint of complexity by a line from Akima. The only thing I loved about them was that they looked like something out of Tron.
Maybe Titan A.E. would have been better as a video game, a PS2 game even. Still, in a time when Hollywood is apparently devoted to remakes and reboots, it's interesting that movies like this are ignored as a remake can give it a second chance, a chance to be what it could have been and should have been.
WesternAnimation Excuse Plot: The Movie
Titan A.E. is the kind of movie that starts off from a noble goal — to create an adult-oriented film that averts the Animation Age Ghetto, filled with a seamless blend of cutting-edge CGI and beautiful hand-drawn animation to enrapture audiences with a suspenseful Space Opera of humanity barely surviving in a cold and merciless universe.
Too bad nobody bothered to actually craft a story for this would-be epic.
Whatever its lofty goals may have been, Titan A.E. ends up as an annoying Cliché Storm that's simultaneously predictable and random. The story is an Excuse Plot to jump from one set piece to another, with no consistency in motives or reasoning. The main characters are flat and generic, and most can be summarized in two- or three-word phrases such as "plucky Action Girl" or "Genius Ditz". Worse, characters who aren't flat are cursed with randomized motivations and Ass Pull swerves instead, such as Korso's inexplicable shift from being Cale's father figure to betrayer of humanity and back again. Then there are the massive headscratchers and storytelling issues, such as why the Drej can't decide whether or not to completely exterminate humanity, or why everyone studiously avoids talking about what's so special about the Titan for the first two-thirds of the film. The end result is a 90-minute mishmash of Cliches and plotholes that prevent the viewer from settling into the movie and enjoying it.
Titan fares a bit better from a production standpoint. The animation is decent overall, though the mix of CGI and hand-drawn art is inconsistent — for every beautiful shot there's an annoyingly clunky one elsewhere, peppered with some rather obvious cuts that break up the flow of the story. Several scenes also exist just to show off the nifty computer-generated visuals, but sometimes they end up feeling like so much Padding instead. The soundtrack is fine for the most part, though the lyrics are sometimes a little too on the nose for the scenes where they're used.
In the right hands, Titan A.E. could have been something special, but here the end result is a disappointing example of clumsy storytelling.