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As long as I've been saving this, I guess it's time to use it: Wow. As in, wow, what a disappointment.
From all the trailers, it looked like a real treat -- a trippy neon s.f. music-video adventure akin to the cult classic Heavy Metal. I once saw a midnight show (remember midnight shows?) of HM at the Plitt Theater (remember the Plitt Theater?) out at the Greenville Mall (remember the Greenville Mall?); when Don Felder's "Take a Ride (on Heavy Metal)" played during the "B-17" sequence, everybody in the nearly full house spontaneously started clapping and stamping to the beat. (This admittedly may have had something to with whatever substance was collecting in a large cloud that partially obscured the screen but otherwise seemed to lend much atmosphere to the proceedings. I can't be sure, since I don't imbibe and had long before developed the ability to breath through the webbing between my toes for as long as two hours, which filters out all airborne particulates except a certain rare, inhibition-stealing Spanish perfume one ex-girlfriend used to wear whenever discretion was not an issue.) I'd never, and haven't since, experienced anything like it. This seemed like a chance to recapture some of that heady zeitgeist, even if now the crowd was made up mostly of young kids and their equally sober parents.
And then the movie started. In a brief prologue, we find 31st-century Earth to be a verdant, productive, highly technologized paradise. Then evil energy-beings called Drej show up to vaporize the whole world, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy-style, in a light show that makes any of the planet-sized explosions from the Star Wars saga look like a roadside flare. As Earth is blowing up, a scientist places his young son Cale in the hands of his alien au pair Tek -- whose idea was it to name the first two major characters after a vegetable and a toothbrush? -- with the promise that he will join them after escaping in our species' last hope, a gigantic pressure-cooker called Titan.
Jump to 15 years later, when this universal Diaspora has turned humanity into the galaxy's boat people. Cale (Damon), who never did find his father, is doing menial labor cutting up space junk until an adventurous human named Corso (Bill Pullman) shows up to take him on your typical cinematic mission from God. Cale knows there must be something to the quest because suddenly a starmap appears in his hand, glowing like a cheap toaster, and a mess of Drej attack and try to make him into little vegetable sushi. With help from Corso and his crew -- a taciturn anime heroine (Drew Barrymore), a cynical wingless bat (Nathan Lane), a fat naked myopic genius turtle (John Leguizamo), and a belligerent killer kangaroo (Janeane Garofalo) -- Cale escapes and heads off looking for Titan. Along the way stuff happens. Finito.
All of which looks really, really good. The animation is a glowing, seamless mix of hand-drawn and computer-generated that's perfect for the story, evoking both HM and Tron. Many of the scenes are out-and-out breathtaking, such as a boat chase across an alien world ripe with explosive hydrogen-trees, and a tense ship-to-ship battle in a field of spaceborne icebergs. But everything happens so fast, nothing has time to sink in. That would be more bearable if the much-touted soundtrack were more organically integrated into the story, but the only tunes that work are Lit's "Over My Head" and "It's My Turn to Fly" by The Urge. Stacked up against Heavy Metal, or either Fantasia for that matter, which all have to make room for several different storylines, Titan A.E. provides less time for tension-building and character development than your average ATM transaction. Wham, bam, thank you fanboy.
Since it was co-written by "Buffy" creator Joss Whedon, I was expecting a lot more. Too bad he was collaborating with the guy who wrote Speed 2. And the 20th Century Fox accounting department, who were willing to provide enough pricey animation time to allow for either a story or action, but not both. (They skimped on the editing, too; in one scene a major character who's been somewhere else suddenly materializes without explanation.) Guess I'll have to check out Heavy Metal 2000 on pay-per-view and hope for something better. C+
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