Thursday, May 30, 2013
Anyone who knows me knows that I am a really big child. So it shouldn’t be a big surprise to hear that I get really excited when a good looking kid’s movie is coming up. Movies like Turbo and Monster’s University are some of my most anticipated movies of this year. So, you can imagine how excited I was for Epic. This looked like Lord of the Rings meets A Bug’s Life. And after all of the failures that Blue Sky Studios has had in the last few years (Ice Age 4, Rio, and Ice Age 3 were all pretty awful), they really needed to score a win here. While it wasn’t as good as the studios best (Ice Age and Horton Hears a Who), it was definitely a step in the right direction for the studio.
Epic tells the story of a girl (Amanda Seyfried) who goes to live with her father (Jason Sudeikis) after her mother passes away. Sadly, she finds that her father is absolutely insane, blabbering on about tiny people who live in the forest...until she finally meets them. I don’t think this could sound any more like the plot of a kid’s movie. It plays into a lot of familiar tropes, but, nonetheless, succeeds (to an extent.)
I think that the biggest thing this film had going for it was the direction. Chris Wedge (who directed Ice Age and Robots) returns for the newest installment in the Blue Sky Studios family, and he really shows his true colors here. He has such a huge kingdom to show off in Epic and does it so perfectly. We see three distinctive places: Bomba’s (Sudeikis) house, the land of the Leafmen, and the Boggan land. Wedge uses his directoral skill to show off these vast lands in beautiful and creative ways. We get to see bird flying and fighting, while also glimpsing a dying forest below. His grasp on “showing is telling” is quite excellent. Plus, the man really knows how to film an action scene. Like I said before, this movie has a lot of Lord of the Rings in it, and that really showed in the action. When we see the Leafmen square off against the Boggans, I couldn’t help but think of the opening battle in Fellowship of the Ring. And, yes, that was intended as the highest of compliments.
I think where this movie really failed was in the script. Yes, I understand it was a movie intended for children, but I don’t think that is a good enough excuse for what this movie did. It pawned off old cliches as if they were original and groundbreaking. I really thought that this was going to be a much better story, with some cool new fantasy themes that I’d never seen before. Who knows, maybe the book has those themes that I’m looking for, but they most definitely were not in the film. Now, I’m not saying the script was terrible, because that isn’t true. I thought the dialogue was pretty great, especially the comedic dialogue given to Chris O’Dowd and Aziz Ansari.
Speaking of O’Dowd and Ansari, I found the voice acting in this movie to be really hit or miss. People like Sudeikis, O’Dowd, Ansari, Hutcherson and Waltz gave really great performances. But then we have people like Ferrell, Tyler and Seyfried who seemed to have phoned it in a bit. No, they weren’t awful, but I didn’t quite get the umph that the other actors infused into their characters. As always, Christoph Waltz stole the show with his exceedingly evil character of Mandrake. Moral of the story: keep giving this man Oscars because he deserves them all.
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I think that this movie benefited from some great voice acting, some strong dialogue, and phenomenal direction. If it could have mustered a little bit more out of some actors, and had a stronger plotline, it might have been worth seeing in the theaters. But for now, I’m gonna tell you to wait.
Writing: 5.5/10
Directing: 8/10
Acting: 7/10
Pacing: 6.5/10
Rewatchability: 7/10
Score: 6.8/10
