...often breathtaking and fanciful to look at and totally unabsorbing to think about.
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Judging by the trailers, "Titan A.E." was going to be an animated "Star Wars," a megahit on a galactic scale. Judging by the movie, it's more like an upgraded Cartoon Network short, a shooting star, gone and forgotten before you know it. An amalgam of the latest computer-generated graphics and old-fashioned line-drawn animation, "Titan A.E." is often breathtaking and fanciful to look at and totally unabsorbing to think about. It is gorgeous picture painting with nothing new to say and nowhere new to go.
The movie's target audience would appear to be twelve-year-old boys, and for such viewers I'm sure it's perfect. Whiz-bang hardware abounds, rocket ships fly in all directions, people shoot at one another every few minutes, and things blow up incessantly. As a grumpy adult, I was bored in two minutes flat. Fortunately, the technical aspects of the DVD are fully in line with the movie's state-of-the-art audiovisual components, so if it's image and sound you're after, "Titan A.E." provides them in all their glory.
The story begins a thousand years in the future, 3028 A.D., where a race of space aliens known as the Drej, creatures made of pure energy, destroy the world for no particular reason. Earthlings have a head start in escaping, however, and set out into space in floating space stations called "Drifter Colonies." Now we fast forward fifteen more years and encounter a young man, Cale (Matt Damon), whom we met earlier as a boy. Seems his father was a scientist back on Earth who developed a so-called "Titan Project," now long lost. Seems, too, that everyone is looking for Cale because unbeknownst to him he is carrying a map to the Titan Project spaceship; and the Titan, like a latter-day Noah's Ark, has the potential to generate another Earth with all its inhabitants. Earthlings want the map to find Titan and establish a new home; the Drej want the map to destroy Titan and keep the Earthlings wandering in space, or something; it's never clear. The Drej simply appear to be evil for their own sake (and for the sake of the plot).
Anyhow, a macho human, Captain Korso (Bill Pullman), persuades Cale to fly off with him in his ship, the Valkyrie, to find the Titan, with the Drej in hot pursuit. Among the costars in the Valkyrie's crew are a beautiful young girl about Cale's age, Akima (Drew Barrymore), a necessary coincidence in any juvenile fantasy; an alien first mate, Preen (Nathan Lane); a goofy alien professor, Gune (John Leguizano); and a kangaroo-like lady named Stith (Janeane Garofalo).
The movie's computer-generated backgrounds are gorgeous and may in themselves be enough to sell the picture. But I wish I could find more things beyond the graphics to cheer about; alas, I cannot. The characters are one-dimensional cardboard cutouts. The line drawings used to represent them never exhibit much facial expression, and the actors voicing their parts do their best coping with the stilted dialogue they're given, usually coming up awkwardly short. If this were a live-action sci-fi adventure and these were live actors in the movie, I should think they'd be laughed off the screen. To be sure, one has to give animated characters a little more leeway than live-action characters, but I was interested in none of them save Preen. Thanks to Nathan Lane, Preen takes shape as the only character with any semblance of individuality or personality in this cartoon world. The rest of the roles are mere stereotypes, such as the clean-cut boy wonder; the masculine, male-chauvinist captain; the dreary, nameless Drej villains; and the cute, cuddly alien creatures that would make George Lucas proud.
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[release]5640[/release]