Titan A.E. - Cheap Thoughts

Hello there, welcome to Cheap Thoughts, where I talk about things that don't matter, and today we're talking about the forgetten work of a great director, Titan AE. Released in the year 2000 and directed by Don Bluth, the king of animation. The film takes place in the year 3043, Cale (Matt Damon) is a salvage yard worker, after the destructon of Earth, along with his father, 15 years ago. After his scrapyard is attacked by the alien race known as the Drej (the same people who destroyed Earth) Cale ends up onboard a ship of a small band of misfit pirates, lead by a man named Korso. As it turns out, Korso and crew are searching for something known as the Titan, which Cale just so happens to have the co-ordinates for, after a long adventure involving betrayal and action, they discover Titan and realise it has the power to create a new Earth, which the Drej are not happy about, so a battle ensues in which Korso sacrifices himself to kill the Drej, New Earth is formed and they all lived happily ever after.

This was Don Bluth's last ever film before he retired and that upsets me greatly, because a director that good should not end his career on a film this bad. I mean, seriously, this film, is god awful. Nothing about it works, it's as cliched and boring as a film can get, these characters are like everything you've seen before, in Firefly or Rebels or Guardains of the Galaxy or really any science fiction series that focuses on a bunch of space outlaws. Granted this did come before most of what made that genre so popular, but the characters in it are boring as hell and are incredibly cliched. Admittedly the designs of the aliens are nice, but they're too obvious, I mean a lot of aliens are based on Earth creatures, but there's little creativity here, the one based on a turtle, looks exactly like a turtle, the one based on Kangaroos looks exactly like a Kangeroo, there's nothing unique about them, physically or personally. The worst one is the main character Cale, who is the most boring, cliched, nice guy thrown into a bad situation that you've ever seen before. Actually let's go back to that Firefly comparison, because this film was co-written by Joss Whedon, and it kinda makes sense because this entire film feels like a first draft on Firefly (Thankfully, it wasn't).

The story is as boring and predictable as you could have imagined, you don't care about what's happening because you've seen it a million times. Nothing about this universe created is unique or inspired, everything about it sucks. And yes, the A.E. does stand for After Earth, that should be a clue on how bad this movie is. The villains are creatures of pure energy, which sounds like a cool concept, but it's completley squandered by how little development they're given. I don't want to repeat myself so i'll some this all up with one word: Boring. Everything about this movie is boring. The characters: Boring. The story: Boring. The designs: Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring.

But that's not even the worst offense, this film does what I didn't even think was possible, the animation, in a Don-Bluth-Movie is absolutley terrible. Those words shouldn't ever have to be in the same sentence, this is Don Bluth, the man behind Land Before Time, An American Tail, The Secret of NIMH. Hell even his bad movies still look nice, but here, this is some of the worst animation ever. Not just because of the blend of hand drawn and computer generated, but yeah, let's talk about that. The movie uses both traditional animation and computer animation and blends the two together and it is the worst blending of the two that I have ever seen. They so obviously do not blend well that this would be embarrasing for a first time director, let alone a veteran like Bluth. But even seperated, the animation is still crap. The computer animation is poorly rendered and looks like a joke, while the hand drawn animation has such a distinct lack of detail and colour palette that it just looks cheap and lazily done.

With the talent behind this film, this could have been something amazing, but instead we got a boring, cliched, ugly and predictable movie that has put me straight up into a state of denial on Don Bluth's involvement in the film.

I'm giving Titan A.E. a 2/10.

-Danny