Review of Titan A.E. (2000) by Kenneth L — 10 Nov 2011

This is a fun, goofy animated science-fiction movie. It kind of plays like a cross between the first Star Wars movie and a cartoon Cliff's Notes for Battlestar Galactica, though obviously not as good as either. It's a movie whose visual ideas can be pretty spectacular, but the story is too conventional and underdeveloped.

The movie starts off pretty spectacularly with the Earth getting destroyed by a hostile alien race, and a little kid escaping the planet just in time. Fast forward 15 years, and wouldn't you know it, it turns out that this kid might just be the last hope for humanity because of a map contained on a ring his father left him. The characters are mostly archetypes, and don't really get much time for character development. The villains are so thinly developed they aren't even one-dimensional - more like half-dimensional.

Matt Damon gives as good a vocal performance as he can as the hero. Bill Pullman is surprisingly good as a roguish space captain, who even wears a differently colored version of Han Solo's wardrobe. Drew Barrymore has to play an utterly shallow and boring female love interest. Nathan Lane gets a much better part as a snarky and condescending alien. John Leguizamo is amusing as a confused little alien scientist.

The movie blends traditional hand-drawn animation (mostly for the characters and some backgrounds), and CGI (for most backgrounds and for action sequences). The combination works better than you might expect, and the concepts for some of the sequences are really very good. One sequence in particular involving giant ice-crystals floating in space is brilliant. Unfortunately, the movie seems to be in too much of a rush, and plot developments often feel way too easy. For instance, at one point two characters are left without a spaceship though they desperately need one. They happen to find a junked-out old ship, and after a brief montage of fixing the ship up straight out of an '80s sports movie, they're suddenly ready to travel anywhere in space. It takes like 30 seconds to solve this rather major problem. Things like this happen again and again throughout the movie. Also, the soundtrack of generic circa-2000 rock is annoying and distracting. This is one of those instances where, if they had managed to come up with a really interesting screenplay and characters to go along with the nicely thought-out and executed animation, it would have been a great movie instead of just a pretty good one.