thomas4cinema

Amazingly, when the opening credits started and the music kicked in over the company logo, I thought it was the latest John Carpenter thing I was about to watch, with strangely crappy and electronic-sounding musical blubber. It somehow continued that over the starting scenes, I was somehow more concentrating on the shortcomings instead of just going along with it. I guess this is because the film suffers from some serious flaws and needs to be watched “in context”. This context being: it is supposed to be watched in the 3D Imax version. The film regularly has scenes that look as if showing them in 3D is the only justification, and you are constantly reminded that you are sitting in the wrong theatre if you are not wearing the glasses. That is not to say that the film does not look good. It actually looks quite eerie and sometimes disturbing, and you could call it “appropriate” in its brownish and clay-coloured look. But the 3D-scenes are distracting if you are just being reminded of them, without being actually able to enjoy them (and after the experience with Harry Potter 3D, I expect them to be amazing). The other context element I found irritating is that the film is an animated feature, and I needed to remind myself why Zemeckis wanted to produce an animated film and not just use those real-life actors that were hanging out at the set and have them play their parts properly. But to be honest: I did not find a reason. You can make a real-life film that looks equally stunning, I am sure. Maybe you have slightly more trouble convincing Ms Jolie to wear the same costume, but then again, Mila Jojovich or somebody would be happy to step in, I am sure. The choice of animation leads to some scenes (especially quick action scenes) looking like an Xbox game, and that is just a bit crappy when you don’t have a game controller in your hand. At the end of the end, it is a pretty entertaining form of nonsense, but less innovative or spectacular than I’d wished.
Official Homepage with quite a bit of entertaining stuff.
IMDB