Review of Ratchet & Clank (2016) by Angela H — 06 May 2016

When I saw this movie, I thought the storyline was very jarring and that there was way too much talking. Now I know why because this wasn't a movie, just the cutscenes from the game that was released along side it.

Many companies can meet the quality of the CGI of Pixar, Disney, or Dreamworks, but story-wise many visually stunning films fall very short. This is one of them. These cutscenes in a game are great, and fit because cutscenes are supposed to talk a lot and give the exposition/directions for the next level.

However in a movie, you are supposed to have a balance of speaking exposition and visual exposition. It was exhausting to watch the movie because there was never a break where you could process all that you just heard.

The movie told the audience everything and visually showed us nothing. The animation quality wasn't stunning as I felt that the mannerisms and character shown in the animation was very different to what I was used to seeing in the previous games.

This is probably due to the fact that most of the production was done overseas by a Chinese company whose employees probably never played any of the previous games to get to know the pre-established characters.

Technically it is pretty good, but you could tell that the animation style was Chinese and not American. There were times where the lip-syncing didn't match up and the textures of the characters seemed to be of a lower quality than some of the latest games.

Quark's suit seemed to be a flat plastic-y material where in some of the games they show the actual mesh texture of it. If this had been a stand-alone movie with no pre-existing franchise, I feel that it would have gone over better and Sony would have marketed it more.

As it is, many of the people who went are the only ones who know it exists, the fans, and it fell short of the expectations we had based on the quality of the games. I have a feeling that some sort of decisions were made up top that changed the direction of the movie and took the control of the quality and story away from Insomniac.

I'm giving 3/5 stars because as a Movie, it was okay and did have a slew of jokes aimed at kids. Take your kids to it if you want, but other than that I feel that this movie will live out the rest of its days on Netflix or the bargain bin.