Review of Thomas and the Magic Railroad (2000) by Simpsonfans — 10 Aug 2016

This is a horrible misuse of the much loved series of stories about every child's favourite tank engine. For a start, it appears to have been written by someone who has never had anything remotely to do with the original stories and TV shows.

The world realised in this movie is nothing like that in the original material. For some reason this film tries to explain why the tank engines are alive. The island of Sodor is some parallel magical dimension model railway, with magical special coal and magical gold dust for teleporting around the place.

Flowers act as telephones, magic vegetables inexplicably hang by cloths pegs, and magic buffers act as a gateway to a conduit between worlds. In the original stories you just accepted the engines had personalities, and it needed no explanation.

Then there's the cast of characters. Rather than have the engines as the main characters and stars of the story, and have the Fat Controller, they had to introduce a cast of completely new human characters.

All of them look like they are lost as the film staggers between poorly disjointed scenes and plot points, and all of them have been given positively terrible dialogue to deliver that wavers from putrid to cliched to saccharine sweet.

Why has a Moondoggie clone been added to this film? What is the purpose of the native American Indian character? Peter Fonda looks particularly lost in his role. Most of the characters act in silos, there is little meaningful interaction between them at all.

Worst of all is the antagonist that has been created for the film - Diesel 10. In all the original stories, all the engines are inherently good and well-meaning, but many have character flaws and they make poor decisions through bad judgement.

Throughout the stories, the engines receive their comeuppance, learn valuable lessons, and redeem themselves. Diesel 10 however is unique in that he is the only truly psychopathic character in the Thomas universe.

He is the clear stereotypical bad guy, and all his intentions are deliberately evil. He is pugnacious, and violent, and wilfully tries to harm other characters for his own means. He has no redeemable qualities whatsoever.

This is an example of the clear Americanisation of this film, where there has to be a clear bad guy who everybody fights against and the audience can hate. Plus they had to add in a pair of brainless stooges for him as well, in classic gangster tradition.

To top it all off, the pacing of the film is dreadful, and the direction non-existent. It is even worse than The Rugrats Movies. Do not see this movie. It sucks major freaking big huge mega ass.