TITAN A.E. (2000) Memory again proves too kind This is one of those movies I saw some time ago, and totally forgot about except for remembering it fondly, and when I finally gave it another look, just why I'd forgotten everything became clear. It's pure overused cliché cheese, almost every frame of it, cheese, cheese, cheese. Every character, cheese. Every situation and plot twist, cheese. I don't mind cheese so much if it's handled right, if the Velveeta current can sweep a viewer along. Here, no. It's thousand or so years in the future, and planet Earth is about to have a really bad day because the electricity-based Drej have decided that it's got to go, for no reason that is ever made clear (lots of "perhaps they were afraid of what we might become!" speculation). So humankind has enough warning to get a little evacuation under way, as well as some clandestine "Titan project" nobody knows much of anything about, but the Drej still come and the Drej still blow up the Earth. Kind of a cool scene there - they even do a bit of a number on the moon. Anyway, Matt Damon does the voice of a hotdogging teenage space scooter jockey who unknowingly holds the secret to scattered humankind's survival. He befriends a couple of humans (voices of Bill Pullman and Drew Barrymore) and a few aliens, the Drej occasionally show up and give them shit, and they seek out what makes the kid so special that the Drej still care. The animation in Titan A.E. is...inelegant. Many people have complained about the abundance of CGI in live-action movies - well, it combines with cell-drawn animation much worse. The environments are terrific. The characters are just kinda there, and not convincingly thanks to that inelegance. The Drej themselves look neat but everybody else is nothing special, even the aliens, and you'd think they'd be the part where the animators would've gone wild. I don't think I was asking for too much that the aliens at least look cool, and in that regard I'm disappointed - I might even go so far as to say that their design and animation is ugly. I wanted more from their personalities too (in an animated movie, the comic relief characters absolutely MUST be funny) but my expectations weren't set that high for them. One character undergoes an on-a-dime change from stand-up hero guy to bloodthirsty hateful villain, and later 180's again just as suddenly back into a stand-up hero guy, his excuse for a second turnaround being basically a lack of anything better to do. Janeane Garofalo, one might think, would make a pretty funky voice-over alien. Turns out, she doesn't - she grunts a lot. As for the hero - he's just another in a long line of clueless teenage heroes who have their adventures handed to them on a silver platter and come out untouchable without paying a price, effectively reducing their humanity-saving heroisms to a screenwriter's contrivance. I know this is a long, myth-archetype-type tradition. All that means to me is that it's had a long time to wear out its welcome. There are still a couple of cool scenes - the destruction of earth ("some human and animal casualties" says the back of the box), and a cat-n-mouse hunt through a great field of gigantic, floating, colliding ice crystals. Two...yeah, that's a couple. There isn't a moment here otherwise that you haven't seen or heard before in a better movie. If this movie hadn't crashed and burned (taking Fox Animation with it), a sequel would've inevitably revealed that Barrymore and Damon's characters were brother and sister. Eeeeeeewww! BACK TO THE T's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE