Movies I Didn't Get

Pretty pictures and A-list voice talent unable to save a convoluted story…

Hello again folks. Thanks for checking in. This time around I’d like to switch gears from live action and focus on a 20th Century Fox animation called Robots. Being a huge fan of all forms of animation, from old fashioned cell to state-of-the-art CG, the little kid inside of me still gets a little giddy every time I’m about to watch an animation I haven’t seen yet. It was no different when I happened upon an animation released in 2005 I had heard very little about called Robots. Now I’ll go and see just about anything Pixar puts out, but I’ve had mixed feelings when it comes to 20th Century’s animation attempts. I want to see Fox put out great works so Pixar has some competition to keep them on their toes, but unfortunately Robots was definitely a movie that I did not get into.

The premise of Robots is simple. The Copperbottom’s are a happy robot couple who live in their peaceful world, filled with spare parts and resources in abundance.  The Copperbottom’s decide to build their own robot son Rodney Copperbottom (voiced by Ewan McGregor) and raise him the best they can. Rodney is a good son with dreams of becoming an inventor like his hero Bigweld. Rodney’s inventions never seem to quite work out the way he intends, but that doesn’t stop him from wanting to show his latest invention to Bigweld and become a famous inventor in the big city. So here we have a simple “small town boy wants to make it in the big city” premise that seems like a reasonable enough base to build from. Despite its unoriginality I was still intrigued enough to go along for the ride at this point. Unfortunately things went downhill from here.

Once Rodney gets to the city, he heads straight for Bigweld’s headquarters. Problem is, Bigweld has gone missing and the company has been taken over by the story’s villain Ratchet. Eventually you find out the one really calling the shots is Ratchet’s mother, but nonetheless, Rodney is turned away by Ratchet with his new objective to find the missing Bigweld. His efforts are threatened by the large collector bots roaming the city vacuuming up all older model robots to have them melted for scrap. These collector bots are a part of Ratchet’s ultimate scheme to stop wasting money reparing non-working robots while forcing any robot who doesn’t want to get scrapped to pay for expensive upgrades.

So with Bigweld missing and Rodney’s dreams of becoming an inventor seemingly crushed, Rodney sees a need to be filled repairing the shunned away and destined-for-scrap-metal robots in the lower part of the city.  This of course infuriates Rachet, causing a conflict between he and Rodney and sets up Rodney’s new goal for the rest of the film: stop Ratchet and restore peace to robot civilization.  Now don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with a protagonist that wants something (even multiple somethings in some cases). But for me, Rodney has just plain too many goals and they keep changing throughout the film. If you haven’t figured this out about me from my Vantage Point article, I am definitely of the quality over quantity camp, and keeping it simple and to the point always hits home for me. Recapping what I’ve written thus far, I’ve come up with five goals for Rodney’s character.

1) Get to the big city
2) Become a famous inventor
3) Save his hero Bigweld
4) Repair all the old robots
5) Stop Ratchet and restore peace to robot civilization

Though arguably his ultimate objective is “restore peace to robot civilization”, Robots muddles the power of this goal by taking too long to present it, slowing down the efficiency of the storytelling with a bevy of not-so-funny characters and side plots that only convolute and weaken the story even more along the way. Despite the many things I think Robots does right, there is too much it did wrong and I just didn’t understand why until I decided to write this article. Every story needs a protagonist who has goals. Robot’s protagonist just has too many that didn’t scream out to me to want to watch him grow and struggle to accomplish said goals. Every story needs a villain who also has something they want, but Robot’s antagonist’s potency is muddled by his mother who is the real antagonist (in other words, one antagonist would have worked better). Ultimately Robots tries too hard to compensate for its predictable story by giving its protagonist too many goals, packing the cast to the brim with a swell of characters voiced by A-list talent (from Ewan McGregor to Robin Williams), beautiful animation and way too many lame jokes. By the end of the film I could care less that there was a happy ending with all parties involved getting what they wanted. All I really wanted were my two hours back.

Contrarily speaking, perhaps Robots might have worked better as a longer format TV series animation since it had so many story angles and characters it wanted to introduce. The series format for animation is much more forgiving than the feature-length format. What a lot of people don’t realize is that the standard two-hour movie format is an unforgiving vehicle to try to deliver a story in.  Especially (in my opinion) when it comes to animation.  So even if your CG/animation quality is top notch, your story better be even more top notch if you want it to work. Though I think audiences tend to suspend their disbelief and be a little more lenient with animation, chocking it up to being just for kids and the like, I would argue that with the influence of Pixar, Miyazaki and Japan’s animation industry on the whole, feature-length animation has become just as brutal of a format to tell stories in as live action feature films and gets taken just as seriously.

Unfortunately for Fox’s Robots, it wasn’t able to keep pace for me. Hopefully in this article I was able to sum up exactly why this was the case. Quality over quantity my friends. Quality over quantity. Robots.  Amazingly beautiful pictures to look at but not much else.

-Review by Corey Birkhofer

I’d like to start this review off with a question: Does anyone even know about this film? The reason I ask is for those of you who don’t know, I am currently living in Gifu, Japan where the selection of films from the west that make it to rental here are not always the most well-known or popular back home. Having only read Wikipedia’s plot description of Vantage Point to refresh my memory of the plot, I saw there that the film got a 95% at Rotten Tomatoes and was overall a box office success when it was released February of 2008. Though after seeing the film I am unable to fathom how that could be the case, why was I suckered into watching Vantage Point? Two words: Matthew Fox. For those of you who are fans of Lost, let me just tell you, it’s even bigger here in Japan. So if any Lost fan sees Matthew Fox’s face on a DVD cover at the store here, they’re going to rent it. Being a diehard fan of Lost myself, I got suckered in by the same Hollywood tactic. Although the premise for the film is a little too reminiscent of 24, I liked the idea of a film that employed Kurosawa’s “Rashomon” effect of showing the same event from multiple perspectives giving the viewer the responsibility of sifting through the facts and coming to their own conclusion. Vantage Point tries to one up Rashomon however in that it gives us eight different perspectives of an assassination attempt on the president while he speaks at an anti-terrorism rally in Spain. Now that you know why I gave Vantage Point a chance, let me get to the real heart of the matter. Why didn’t I get this film?

Let me start at the start. What’s the film about? I think the explanation over at Wikipedia gives a much better rundown of the plot of the film, but even so, the Wikipedia breakdown is difficult to follow. Let me ask the more important question then: Why is this film so difficult to get? Let’s jump back to Kurosawa for a moment. For those of you who haven’t seen Rashomon, Kurosawa revolutionized the world of cinema in 1950 when he made a film that showed the attempted rape of a young woman from four different and conflicting perspectives (the attacker, the woman and her chivalric samurai husband, as well as a nameless woodcutter). Rashomon rocked the cinema world with this concept, and its influence is still felt today as evidenced in Vantage Point taking on the same technique in the telling of its own story. So aside from Kurosawa being a master of storytelling, why was he successful where Vantage Point’s director Pete Travis was not? In my opinion it comes down to quantity over quality. Kurosawa gave us four sharply distinct perspectives where Vantage Point gives us eight. This is simply put too many perspectives to sift through and form a conclusion. Instead of piercing our hearts with a shocking event shown to us a few times, we get the same moments leading up to an assassination attempt on the president ad nauseam, until we don’t even know why we wanted to see the film in the first place. Though some of the characters in the eight vantage points do have intriguing stories, the impact of their struggle is muted by lesser important side characters whom we have to sit through and watch their perspective of the same event. Director Peter Travis would likely argue that every vantage point in the film is there to service the story, but after seeing the same event eight times, I think even he realized audiences might be annoyed and want to move further into the story instead of getting in the 10 minutes leading up to the attack, rewind, showing another character’s point of view of the 10 minutes leading up to the attack, times eight. By the fourth or fifth time of finally getting done with seeing one perspective, I prayed I would be allowed to go further into the story, only to get forced back to watch the same 10 minutes from another character’s perspective.

So who exactly are these characters? Let me say the cast is pretty ensemble, with a ton of well-known faces from Dennis Quaid to Forest Whitaker, Matthew Fox, Sigourney Weaver and even William Hurt! Talk about pulling off all the stops. The other three perspectives of the event are from some newer faces, played by Ayelet Zurer, Eduardo
Noriega and Édgar Ramírez. But as awesome as the cast was for Vantage Point, we’re all smart enough to know a great cast can never save a lackluster story. Aside from the unoriginality

of its opening, at least the film starts off with a strong inciting incident that propels us into the story. Believe me, I’ve seen a lot of films without a strong inciting incident and let me give my two cents that if you want a film to draw your viewer in, a strong inciting incident is definitely going to help that along. However, even more important than a strong inciting incident is a CLEAR inciting incident which Vantage Point definitely does not have. Though the first couple perspectives we see are interesting and very realistically shot, the power of the attack gets more and more muted as the film rewinds us eight times over. With so many characters and perspectives to sift through, it was hard for me to find my “that could be me” character that I wanted to see grow throughout their arc. Instead, everything became a mess as I was introduced to too many perspectives, some with characters that the film never revisits which left me all the more frustrated. The only character that seemed to have any real beginning/middle/end arc was Dennis Quaid’s character Thomas Barnes. Barnes is a burnt out Jack Bauer archetype working as a secret service agent taken off the field for stopping a bullet meant for the president several years previous. Still shaken up from the shooting, he is extra paranoid while the president speaks out against terrorism in a huge outdoor coliseum filled with spectators. To Dennis Quaid’s character, everyone is a potential suspect and we see just how paranoid his being shot has made him. Barnes’ integrity is questioned by his partner Kent Taylor, played by Lost’s Matthew Fox. Taylor feels it’s still too early for Barnes to be back on the field at such an important event. We later find out Taylor has shed his American ties and is working in alliance with the terrorists from the inside. His goal is then to stop Barnes’ who is the only real threat to their plans to assassinate the president. From Quaid’s character, the character’s get more and more thin as you go down the line. Forest Whitaker’s character had great potential to lend an interesting perspective to see the event from as he plays a tourist on vacation in Spain. At the event with his video camera in hand, he records the anti-terrorist rally in the minutes leading up to the explosion. After the attack, his footage is quickly confiscated by Barnes who is hell bent on capturing the people responsible, but from there Whitaker is now camera-less and has lost his eyes with which to show us his perspective from. Director Pete Travis shows us several more sympathetic perspectives to try to get us to come along for the ride, but ultimately each character is only given their few minutes to show us their perspective before we’re pushed on to t he next point of view.

Though I tip my filmmaker hat off to the filmmaker’s in their attempt to center an entire film around one shocking scene, by giving us too many perspectives of it the impact of the event is muddled, we are unable to sympathize with any one character, feel any anger towards the antagonist and most importantly want to see the protagonist change. In short, you can’t center a story around one single shocking event if you erase it’s impact by showing it to us too many times with characters who never have a chance to grow. Quality over quantity 101. This is something Kurosawa realized in Rashomon. So if you haven’t seen either film I would recommend: watch Vantage Point first, then watch Rashomon and tell me what you got out of both. Now in the interest of not repeating myself eight times over, I’ll wind this down and wait to hear back from you. If it sounded like I was repeating the same gripes over and over in this article, maybe Vantage Point has had more of an influence on me than I realized. Time to go watch a movie that I actually get. Hello Rashomon!

-Review by Corey Birkhofer