Review of The Grinch (2018) by Shaun B — 25 Nov 2018

Probably my favorite of movies produced by Illumination. This movie was adapted from a children's book, which implied that there would be details that needed to be added to extend this movie to a feature-length film. But since the Grinch and other characters have so little for character traits, producers needed to further develop the characters by adding character traits to existing characters, as well as new characters and story arcs for them to go through. While these additions would mostly be tedious, there were some good and bad ones. The best of these additions was Cindy Lou's arc. All she wants for Christmas is for her mom to be happy, and I thought it was going to be terrible. However, they put a interesting child-like wonder spin on the story, involving trapping Santa to tell him her wishes. But, this movie also has bad additions and filler as well. As much as filler goes, that mostly consisted of the scenes in Whoville or where the movie spent a little too much time on jokes that just fell flat. Did they really have to include Grinch being chased around by carolers? However, the things that really hurt this movie, was the addition to the Grinch's backstory and his character arc. In the original book, Grinch didn't have a backstory, he just hated Christmas. However, when making a full-length film on the Grinch, the first question to be asked is probably, "Why does the Grinch hate Christmas?" Now, Christmas movies have been done to death, and in some of these there is a scrooge or in our case, a Grinch, and creating a backstory on these characters is really hard in terms of satisfaction. The time spent on his backstory was so minimal for the impact it could've had on the movie. I would argue it would be better for him not to tell us backstory, like he was unwilling to share it or think about it. The reasons they gave, however, were very common and boring, so I'm glad they didn't spend too much time on it. And at the end of the movie, we had the Grinch give a speech on how he was so sorry, and I for one was extremely annoyed by this. This was a very unsatisfying falling point to the climax of Grinch's arc. Because of this, it made a potentially good ending feel cheesy.

But there were plenty of positives too. For example the build-up towards the climax was nice to watch, all of his gadget building, searching for reindeer, as well as his recon attempts, it felt like no time was wasted and that everything was well paced. The jokes in the movie for the most part were pretty good, it's hard to make laugh out loud but I appreciated the sense of humor it had an could see this as a very humorous children's film. The comic relief character also didn't feel overbearing, that may have been because he was there for ten minutes and a small cameo in the end of the film, but nevertheless he gets a pass. I like how the Grinch just doesn't only have one emotion now, but a conflicted perspective of emotion and who he cares about. As for the animation, it didn't look bad. There are times where the movie really shines with its animation, like in the Stealing Christmas scene, everything was animated so fluidly and was so intriguing to watch, I was invested. But of course, the animation style is not my favorite but it isn't something to be mad about either. An the final thing I'd like to talk about is the music, the music has been greatly changed from its previous incarnation, using different music mediums like rap, jazz, and of course some original remixed soundtracks.

Overall, I was expecting worse but I came out surprised and had a good experience. Definitely not one of my favorite movies but a good one nonetheless. 6/10.