June 15–22, 2000

movie shorts

Titan A.E.

As much good as it does my heart good to see anyone take on Disney’s animation juggernaut, Don Bluth has made a particularly rancid try at it over the years, mostly trying to beat Disney at their own game (Anastasia, An American Tail). Titan A.E. stalks out in a new direction — space opera — with no better results. A blatant Star Wars derivative (at one point, the hero screams, "I can’t shake ’em!"), the story is set a millennium in the future, where an alien race called the Dredge (good name for a metal band, that) has blown up Earth and scattered humanity across the galaxy. Cale (Matt Damon) is the son of an Earthling inventor who just happens to have a map to humanity’s salvation embedded in his hand, while Bill Pullman (unconsciously echoing his character from Spaceballs), John Leguizamo and Janeane Garofalo fill out the rest of his motley space rescue crew. Playing like it was translated into another language and left that way, Titan thuds at every step, with clumsy dialogue ("Doctor, the Dredge have wrecked the global defense system!") hokey and predictable plot twists, and clumsy action sequences that skip over the parts they should be drawing out. Worst of all, in a desperate attempt to appeal to "the kids," everything is slopped over with horrible alternarock and fake ska. If music still sounds that bad in a thousand years, maybe humanity isn’t worth saving.

—Sam Adams