With school holidays and the festive season looming, the kids will need to be entertained. Two films released this week promise such entertainment, though anyone over 14 may find them a little trying.
Titan AE is an animated science-fiction adventure about saving the remnants of earthly life after this world has been destroyed – the “AE” of the title stands for “After Earth”. That apocalypse takes place in 3028AD, which is a relief to those of us unlikely to make it very far into the 21st century. Fifteen years AE, a young man (ventriloquised by Matt Damon, and looking a little like him) who works at a deep-space salvage station discovers his special mission to put it all right, and off he goes on a rip-roaring rollercoaster ride across several planets and asteroid belts, fighting weird foes and romancing, of course, the only woman available.
So far so Star Wars; the spaceship stuff as well as the gallimaufry of odd-looking aliens found on the Trade Ship Soros (any relation to George?) and elsewhere. Some of the aliens are cute, so they are goodies, and others are not, so they are baddies: the very bad ones, the Drej, who are responsible for all but exterminating humanity, are so bad that they get subtitles when they shout, in their warped tongue: “Destroy the humans! Destroy them all!”
Those subtitles later went fuzzy at the screening I attended (at the Zone of Rosebank), so I knew it wasn’t just my eyes tiring toward the end of all this whizz-bang-whoosh action, and the movie was actually out of focus. It didn’t matter much, though, because the animation is pretty ordinary anyway. The spaceships and trips are impressive, but for the most part this is certainly not “the next generation of filmed animation”, as it claims to be. Dinosaur more plausibly gets that appellation; Titan AE is just a faster and slicker version of a kind of animated movie we’ve seen before.
Instead of saving humanity and the legacy of Planet Earth, The Grinch is about saving Christmas. This is a well-worn theme: Christmas, in fact, needs to saved from two enemies. One is itself, or its commercial version, in which shopping for presents outweighs the true meaning of Christmas (something to do with family and togetherness and being nice to people; the birth of Jesus has nothing to do with it). The other enemy it has to be saved from is those who don’t like Christmas at all, like Scrooge in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.
In this case, the Scrooge figure is the Grinch, a kind of crazed green yeti who dislikes all Yuletide jollity. In his ire, he comes down from his mountain hideaway and bothers people and steals their presents. Thus (stop reading now if you don’t want to know the utterly predictable happy ending) everyone learns a lesson about the true meaning of Christmas and, moreover, they get their presents back, so they get to have their cake and eat it too. The fact that this compromises the theme of anti-commercialism shouldn’t surprise one when the movie is a big-budget Hollywood fantasy starring one of its most expensive stars, Jim Carrey.
Based on the Dr Seuss story, The Grinch is set in Whoville, a garish toytown inhabited by people with funny hairdos and prosthetically distorted faces that make them look like genetically modified chihuahuas (and they probably have never heard of Jesus Christ, either). Some of the charm of Dr Seuss’s origi-nal drawings is transmitted, but much is lost, too; their inherent naivety and casual surrealism is replaced by cuteness and sentimentality, specialities of director Ron Howard.
Carrey, in greenface once more, is amusing in his patented over-the-top way, with a repertoire of wild gestures and an accent that seems borrowed from an alcoholically dazed Sean Connery. Sweet little Cindy Loo Who (Taylor Momsen) is the child who saves him, and until she starts singing she’s not bad – at least they didn’t mess around with her face.