Thursday, June 21, 2018

The Emoji Movie

Year 10, Day 171 - 6/20/18 - Movie #2,967

BEFORE: I know, I can't believe it's come to this, either.  But there's part of me, a very sick part, that's curious - it just can't be as bad as everyone said, right?  I mean, millions of years of human evolution somehow brought us to this time, this place, this movie - surely there must be something redeeming here, some sign of man's great achievement, every movie is part of the great historical record, the fabric of life resonates through this somehow, right?

Eh, it's probably going to suck.  But if it is that bad, then let's get it off my list and out of my Netflix queue as soon as possible, OK?  Honestly, I need the linking as Jennifer Coolidge carries over from "Mascots", and I promise this is setting up something good, OK?  My linking now can take me to THREE films from 2018 this week, one which I'm sneaking out to see in the movie theater tonight, and the other two I saw 2 or 3 months ago, and I've spent all this time just trying to link my way to them.  But we're clearing the books this week of everything I saw this spring, and the road to those films leads right through "The Emoji Movie", as strange as that sounds.

Anyway, a mascot is a symbol for a team, and emojis are all symbols of things, so there is sort of a loose theme developing here...for whatever that's worth.


FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Angry Birds Movie" (Movie 2,694)

THE PLOT: Gene, a multi-expressional "Meh" emoji, sets out on a journey to become a normal emoji.

AFTER: I think the biggest problem here (and mark my words, there are many, MANY problems here...) is that this film has no internal logic, not that makes any sense, anyway.  In this electronic "city" of Tech-polos that's inside a kid's phone, there are emojis that are all each one thing, and object or an emotion.  Those are the rules, everything is only one thing, and for some reason each emoji has a little life in this little world, but always has to be ready to be "scanned" each time the phone-user wants to use it to express an idea or an emotion in a text.  So the smiley face has to ALWAYS be smiling, the sad face ALWAYS has to be crying, the devil is always a devil, and so on.

Except that's somehow not the case - the "Meh" emoji somehow is excited to be on the job for the first day, which means right from the start, the plot doesn't make any sense.  He should be neutral and dismissive about his first day on the job, right?  Because you JUST SAID he's one emotion, he can only be that one emotion, and that's all he can ever be, because programming.  So nervous, excited, thrilled to be a functioning emoji - he should be none of these things.  Plus his parents are both "Meh" emojis - what happened, did they retire?  They got fired for doing a bad job?  How the heck does an emoji reproduce, anyway.  The screenwriter should have stopped right here and quit his job, or at least I'm hoping he took a long, hard look in the mirror to consider the life choices that brought him to this point, where this is now his job.

This is also where I started to realize the similarities to "Wreck-It Ralph", how this is essentially the same exact story.  Ralph lived inside a video-game, which bore a similar resemblance to a tech-based city, and he could go from one video-game in the arcade to another, just as Gene gets to travel from app to app in the phone.  Ralph was programmed to do one thing, and tried to rise above his programming to go from villain to hero, and Gene was similarly programmed to have just one emotion, but once he gets labeled as a "malfunction", he goes on a similar quest to get fixed so he can work again as part of the greater text-message society.

The similarities don't end there - Ralph meets Vanellope, who aids him in his quest, and Gene meets Jailbreak, who travels with him on his quest to get to DropBox so they can be uploaded out of the phone and become whatever they're really meant to be.  Or maybe she's supposed to hack the system to make Gene the one-motioned creature he's supposed to be, this is really unclear.  The motivations kept changing here, which is another sign that the whole endeavor is illogical nonsense. There's no clear path to a resolution here, once the characters start their wandering through this app or that - it's basically just a bunch of shoutouts to kitten videos on YouTube, vacation photos on Instagram, music on Spotify or SnapChat or whatever the filmmakers think might have some resonance with today's kids, as if they're going to get really excited over hearing the names of apps they might use spoken in a movie.  How misguided is that?

The one little germ of story that even exists here has to do with the fact that Gene can't seem to hold one emotion, he's somehow the first multi-emotive emoji, and as stated above, that isn't even a thing - but since Alex (the owner of the phone in the real world) sent this emoji to the girl he's got a crush on (this makes no sense, either, like how was he going to win her over with the "Meh" emoji?) she ends up interpreting this as "This boy has a lot of complex emotions, so he must be really deep and sensitive" when in fact nothing could be further from the truth.  He's what, a 12 -year old boy?  Let's face it, he wants to make out with a girl but he has no idea how to achieve that, or what happens after.   If he has to hide behind an emoji to express his feelings, she's eventually going to figure out that he's just not that complicated.

Let's start the parade of NITPICK POINTS:

Why is the "eggplant" emoji relegated to the "losers lounge"?  We all know what the eggplant really stands for, you'd think that 12-year old boys would be talking/thinking about their own "eggplants" all the time, so they'd probably all use it more often.

For that matter, why are there "internet troll" characters in the phone's trash?  Does anyone who made this film know what an internet troll is?  It's not a character on your phone, or an app, or anything like that, it's another person on the net who says something to rattle you.  Why would any "trolls" be on Alex's phone?  A message from a troll, maybe, but the trolls themselves?  Another thing on a long list of things that don't make any sense.

Who has a "Dance video" app on their phone?  Isn't this something more akin to a video game that you would play on a Nintendo Wii or a Playstation on a large-screen TV?  How is anyone supposed to see the dance moves on a tiny phone screen, especially if there's more than one player?  "Candy Crush" on a phone, sure, but not "Just Dance".

The emojis are already scanned, because you can SEE THEM when you want to pick the right one.  SO there's no reason why every emoji would be "standing by" and waiting to be scanned, because this would just take too long, it's unnecessary work for any phone to do.

Why did Alex take the phone in to tech support?  Why not just delete the operating system or wipe the phone himself, or wait to download the next OS upgrade, which is probably due in like a week or so?  All this just because ONE EMOJI didn't send right?  My phone would have to be horribly malfunctioning for me to take it anywhere near an Apple store - and even then, I wouldn't let those weasels do anything to it without thinking it over for a month or so, trying some other things on my own and then realizing I had no other option.

Also, emojis are a standard set, the same ones appear on every phone that has that OS.  Wiping the phone to correct one emoji would be like burning down your house to find your lost hamster.  If the emoji is not working for one user, chances are that EVERY user is having a problem with that emoji, so it's probably better to wait until enough people complain about it so that the problem gets fixed system-wide.  Remember how people lost their minds because the "cheeseburger" emoji had the cheese UNDER the burger patty and not on top of it?  Enough people applied pressure to the central office, and they changed the art.  Which is silly, because it doesn't matter where you put the cheese on your burger, and it even makes more sense to put the burger on top of the cheese if you want to add ketchup or pickles or onions and not have those things mixed up in the cheese.  If you ask me, the ketchup needs to touch the burger patty, not the cheese, and if you use a hard cheese (like my favorite, horseradish cheddar) the cheese melts better if you put it UNDER the patty.  So there.

I'm sure I'm missing a lot of NPs, plus I think I've just proven that I thought about this plot much, much more than any of its screenwriters did.  Which is a shame.  Now, if they REALLY wanted to make an innovative emoji movie, they should have told the entire story IN EMOJIS, like not with characters talking and moving around, just the real emojis from the standard set on the phone.  It could have been done, and then we could have seen kids following the story as the emojis popped up on the movie screen, while every single parent would have been thinking, "What the HELL is this?  I can't follow this story at all!"  Now THAT would have been hilarious.

Also starring the voices of T.J. Miller (last seen in "Deadpool"), James Corden (last heard in "Norm of the North"), Anna Faris (last heard in "Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip"), Maya Rudolph (last seen in "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping"), Steven Wright (last heard in "The Swan Princess"), Patrick Stewart (last seen in "Logan"), Christina Aguilera (last seen in "Pitch Perfect 2"), Sofia Vergara (last seen in "Chef"), Sean Hayes (last heard in "Monsters University"), Rachael Ray, Jeffrey Ross (last seen in "Stuck on You"), Jake T. Austin (last heard in "Rio 2"), Tati Gabrielle, Sean Giambrone, Timothy Durkin, Liam Aiken (last seen in "A Series of Unfortunate Events"), Adam Brown (last seen in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales"), Conrad Vernon (last heard in "Sausage Party"), Rob Riggle (last seen in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2").

RATING: 2 out of 10 delete-bots (that should have taken a crack at deleting this whole script)

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