Review of Titan A.E. (2000) by Edith N — 21 Mar 2013

Pointing the Way to Better Things.

The problem with this movie is that it isn't as good as it could be. This was a movie with enormous amounts of potential, a chance to really show Americans that animation isn't just kids' stuff. I mean, okay, we're still talking about a PG-rated picture, so still family, but this film dealt with some rather heavy issues, and not in the most simplistic way possible. A son has to come to terms with the fact that his father's abandonment was for the greater good, and that's a hard issue for any film. Unfortunately, the film doesn't handle it very well, the soundtrack is lousy, and the special effects seem to upstage the rest of the story. I don't think this is really that bad a film, but I also think it's only just barely better than its reputation. As in, it's not a bad movie, but it also isn't really a good one. It's a so-so movie, but it acquired the reputation of a terrible one.

In 3028, energy beings known as the Drej destroy the Earth for reasons I confess are never entirely clear to me. The population tries to flee, and a lot of them get away, but they are refugees. They are unpopular with the other beings in the galaxy. One of the survivors is Cale Tucker (Matt Damon). His father (Ron Perlman) had been one of the leaders of the humans, but he took off when Cale was a boy (and voiced by Alex D. Linz). Now, Cale lives the kind of life refugees often do, working manual labour with beings who don't like him. Then, he is found and recruited by Joseph Korso (Bill Pullman), because Korso knows that Cale's father left him with a map to the [i]Titan[/i], a spaceship that will somehow, he doesn't know how, save humanity. Cale mostly agrees to go along because the human member of Korso's crew is Akima (Drew Barrymore), and Cale falls for her right away. Because of course he does. Also, the Drej somehow know what's going on--this, I did catch, but it's a spoiler--and are out to get Cale.

The combination of the soundtrack and the PG rating leads me to believe that the planned market for this movie was teenagers, and more specifically teenaged boys. (This supposition is helped by my recollection that the first trailer for this aired in connection with [i]Phantom Menace[/i], which came out a full year earlier.) The problem, other than the kind of rock they've chose for the soundtrack, is that teenaged boys tend to look at animated movies, at least American ones, as kids' stuff. A certain class of them are fine with animation as long as it's Japanese, but American animation isn't their thing. Yeah, there are always some who go against that, but as a demographic, they weren't going to be interested. Unfortunately, most of the worst decisions made over the course of the movie were made with the intention of bringing in the demographic, meaning they also drove away the kind of people who didn't like that choice.

The voice cast on this was interesting. Matt Damon is pretty consistent; yeah, okay, he doesn't always do the best work, but he seldom does anything actually bad. Just, you know, stuff I don't care about. Drew Barrymore does the occasional bad romantic comedy, but she's also a perfectly competent actress who isn't really called on to do much here anyway. She's the standard "hero's girlfriend." What got really weird was that Nathan Lane ends up voicing a surprisingly fierce character. Oh, he's not always that tough, but when called on for it? It's hard to remember that it's Nathan Lane. I don't know that I would have thought to cast Ron Perlman as Matt Damon's father, but since you never actually see him, why not? And both Janeane Garofalo and John Leguizamo do decent enough work with their parts, which are mostly comic relief. Still, they're at least funny enough to merit the term, which not all animated comic relief turns out to be.

I really hate falling back on "this was really pretty," because it seems so much like damning with faint praise. It was really pretty; there's a scene where Cale is flying the ship that adds nothing to the plot but is lovely for all that. I don't think the character design is quite as creative as it could be--even the beings of pure energy generally appear in humanoid form--but there is a consistent and probably true belief that we have a hard time forming connections to non-humanoid characters in film. We anthropomorphize animals, but even leaving that aside, at least they're still familiar. So, yes, bilateral symmetry will be a thing for our aliens. However, considerable creativity was shown in the construction of the various ships and habitats, and the wonders of space are almost as lovely as they are in pictures from Hubble. There's an interesting play on the reflectivity of ice in one of the grimmer sequences, and the Drej are as beautiful as they are inexplicable, and why should beings of pure energy make sense to meat puppets anyway?