Titan A.E. Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)July 5th, 2000
PLANET SICK-BOY: http://www.sick-boy.com
"We Put the SIN in Cinema"
Toward the end of Fox’s new animated feature Titan AE, one of its characters shouts “Let’s not do that again,” after flying a spaceship through a tough-to-navigate ice field. One has to wonder when Fox is going to come to the same conclusion about their animated film division. They continue to shell out top dollar to produce expensive ‘toons that are panned by critics and go widely unseen by the public (like 1997’s Anastasia).
Titan lifts its story from – oh, I don’t know – every successful science-fiction film that I’ve ever seen in my life. The only thing that keeps Titan from being an extremely unwatchable film is the animation, which is astonishingly well-done here. But like other highly touted animated films of late, Titan’s vividly realistic backgrounds and inanimate objects are ruined by dull sketches of people and other assorted creatures. Why does the technology used to animate humans seem like it hasn’t been updated since Pearl Harbor? I’ve seen better-looking people in after school cartoons and video games, not to mention Toy Story and its sequel.
Titan is set some 1,000 years from now and kicks off with a spectacular opening sequence, where an alien race called The Dredge hover over Earth with the intention of destroying our planet. The Dredge don’t mess around like those pesky creatures from ID4. They blow Earth up in all of five seconds, sending chunks of it scattering around the solar system like the lumps of loose stool in my toilet after a night of hearty Mexican food and beer (hence the AE – for “After Earth”). Some of Earth’s humans manage to escape before The Dredge do their dirty work, including a blond scamp named Cale (Alex D. Linz, Home Alone 3). Cale’s father gives him a pat on the head and a gold ring, and tells him that he’ll see him in a few years.
Flash to fifteen years later, where an adult Cale (Matt Damon, The Talented Mr. Ripley) is working as a space welder on a salvage station. With most of Earth’s inhabitants destroyed by The Dredge, humans are now looked down on and bullied like members of a middle-school chess club. One day, the Luke Skywalker-like Cale is approached by the Han Solo-like Korso (Bill Pullman, Brokedown Palace), who tells him that he is the only person in the galaxy that can determine the location of something called the Titan Project, which is supposed to be humanity's only chance at defeating The Dredge.
It turns out that Cale’s ring, which he wears every day despite hating his father for leaving him, is genetically encrypted and produces a map revealing the location of the Titan (of course the magic ring appears on his hand only when it’s integral to the plot, and Cale never noticed the little buttons on the inside that Korso presses to activate the stupid thing). Cale is reluctant at first, but eventually relents and joins Korso in his search for the Titan. Korso has a bunch of sidekicks, including a super-genius turtle that sounds like Peter Lorre (John Leguizamo, Summer of Sam), a gun-toting bad-ass (Nathan Lane, Isn’t She Great), something called Stith (Janeane Garofalo, 200 Cigarettes) and a gorgeous brunette named Akima (Drew Barrymore, Never Been Kissed).
There are no surprises in Titan’s script. In fact, the only thing remotely unexpected is how little the characters look like their real-life counterparts. I always thought that animators tried to make their characters appear somewhat similar to the actors that provide their voices. Damon is the only one who comes close, but his Cale is a dead-ringer for James Van Der Beek (I kept waiting for the Paula Cole song to sneak up on me). Pullman isn’t close at all, and Barrymore’s character looks Asian, and even has an Asian-sounding name. Lane would probably burst into tears just from seeing a photograph of a gun, so the idea of him playing his role is laughable.
I expected a lot more from Titan, especially considering the talent that produced the script. Three gifted writers (Joss Whedon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer), John August (Go) and Ben Edlund (The Tick) churned out a paint-by-numbers story with a really silly ending. Their script was based on a story by Randall McCormick (Speed 2: Cruise Control) and Hans Bauer (Anaconda), which could explain a lot about the film’s crapulence. I was looking forward to snappy dialogue and witty banter, like from Buffy and Go, but there was precious little to enjoy. I did laugh out loud at the cheesy A-Teamesque montage of Cale and friends repairing a dilapidated spaceship, but I don’t think that’s what overrated directors Don Bluth and Gary Goldman (Anastasia) were going for.
So who exactly is supposed to want to see Titan? The question is a no-brainer, judging from the people that showed up for the advanced screening. The film is targeted to prepubescent boys and nerdy men that still haven’t seen a real live naked woman yet. This is probably why the plot features a jaded guy with floppy hair that doesn’t fit in socially and still manages to land an impossibly curvy girlfriend. It’s also chock-full of songs from Powerman 5000, Lit, Luscious Jackson and a plethora of other hot modern rock ballads.
1:34 - PG for action violence, brief language, an animated bare ass and the implication that Cale has a boner in one scene
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