Review of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009) by Clem666 — 19 Jul 2021

It is hard to realize how truly weird this movie is. If the plot remains overly simple from beginning to the end the execution totally lacks to be desired. It all feels so often confusing, repetitive and drafty.

Characters are as shallow and uninteresting as the relation they all build together. Many of them can easily be synthetized in one dialogue line to identify how simple and non-nuanced their goals and purpose are. The villain appear to be overly stereotyped witout any decent reason. The romance is poorly written, with the classic 'love at first sight' followed by all the awkwardness you can imagine. Hero's family ties are boring and incomplete as they all focus on Flint's aspirations and struggles in life.

If 'Cloudy with Chance of Meatballs' could have been a deep satire of the omnipresence of food, its unavoidable waste and its terrible overconsumption, it eventually falls far from it as it constantly develops effort to remain in a bizarre and dumb category. It is like if the directors didn't even realize they were tackling some major and potentially interesting issues in our societies! I would say it becomes weirder and weirder as we come closer to the end, in a way that the ending scenes take an unexplainable taste of surrealism.

3D effects appear to be rather ugly from time to time. Music is as uninspired as generic. Humour almost always follows the main weirdo theme of the movie but sometimes manages to be surprisingly clever here and there. In the whole hometown we only focus on less than eight characters.