Atlantis: The Lost Empire - 8.2/10
Of all the Disney movies I've seen, this one felt the least like a Disney movie. Even the other ones with mature themes like The Lion King, The Hunchback of Notre Dame or The Emperor's New Groove
don't compare to this one on that level. This is an
adventure/expedition flick, complete with huge body count and live
ammunition/actual violence. It's not rated PG for nothing. As a film in
that genre it worked pretty well, though less time was spent on
adventuring and more on what they did when they actually got there. That
may have been to give the obligatory princess more screen time, and as
eye-rolly as I can get about fanservice, I can't say I was really
complaining all that much if you know what I mean. This movie plays like
National Treasure if all the clues had been solved for
them before the start of the film and all they had to do was go down
there - and then discovered the immortal founding fathers just sort of
chilling out in the cave
I like this kind of film, and so naturally I liked this one. I didn't
see it when it first came out but rather a few years later and it
instantly rocketed to the top of my favorites list. Top five, easy.
Watching it again, I still enjoy it but there are a couple of things
that didn't bother me the first time that kind of bug me now. First off,
the language thing. I'm just going to state the obvious: languages do
not work that way. At least in Pocahontas they just sort
of hand-waved it away with magic, or "listening with your heart", or
whatever. Here though, they try to play it off with some mumbo-jumbo
about all current languages being derivative of Atlantean. I'm sorry,
but no. This must be what engineers and physicists feel like whenever
they listen to the techno babble on Star Trek. I don't know how they can stand it.
Second, the Atlanteans themselves. I can accept them being immortal (or
just really long-lived, that wasn't quite clear), and I can accept them
having forgotten their past and their culture and their written
language...but not both. What, did everybody just wake up one day and
forget all the stuff they could do the day before? And amazingly some
guy from outside comes in and figures out in a day what they couldn't
suss out for themselves in nearly 9000 years. That's just pathetic.
Third, the clues were contrived. There's a book that tells a firsthand
account of a journey to Atlantis...written in Atlantean. This means
several things: A.) the person who wrote it was Atlantean yet on the
surface when the city sank. B.) Said person was able to somehow travel
to the ocean floor over 8000 years before the technology to do so was
even theoretically possible, and C.) This person then apparently decided
to return to the surface via the same unknowable means and write a
journal that he proceeds to tell no one about.
After that, there was the
clue that led to the journal. A medieval manuscript that says it was
somewhere in Iceland. This raises further questions: A.) How did the
person writing this know about the journal, let alone where it was, and
why did they feel the need to write about it? B.) Why did they leave the
journal there instead of taking it with them? C.) Given that this
manuscript was written centuries ago, what guarantee is there that no
one else has found and removed the journal in the intervening period?
After all, this manuscript was apparently just lying around ready to
guide anyone interested right to it. After all, the lead character's
grandpa beat him to it. I said before that the lack of time spent on the
hunt might have been to give the princess more screen time, but now I think it
may have been even more deliberate than that. The less emphasis the
movie places on these incredibly contrived clues, the better.
What works in this film though really does work. The rest of the story
is fun and exciting, the animation is excellent and the art is simply
breathtaking. I've already said that I'm a huge fan of Princess Kida's
design, though I wish they'd given her a bit more characterization. The
only character I didn't really like was the lead. He was so dorky and
awkward, which I've seen a million times, especially in Disney.
Couldn't they change it up for once and have someone competent yet
maligned by his peers for his crazy ideas running the show? After all,
that's what real expeditionary scholars are like. And the sad part is,
they really did have a character like that in the grandfather, who was
dead before the movie even began. Again, a sigh to what could have been.
All the above considered, I still did really enjoy this film. The cast
as a whole was interesting, the art and animation were great and it was
nice to see Disney trying something so new and different and doing a
relatively good job of it.
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