BEFORE: Thank God for actors with very long careers, like Christopher Plummer and Timothy Spall. I just wouldn't be able to do what I do without their decades of service. Seriously, I linked from a 2017 Oscar-winning film back to a little British comedy from 2001, and now with the voice of Timothy Spall carrying over, I'm back to the present (umm, or is it past?) with an animated comedy from just last year. Whew, time-traveling back to the start of the millennium can really wear me out.
I'm no closer to fixing the October dilemma this year, in fact it seems like watching this film today removes a link to a horror-themed film - and I'm referring to "The New Mutants", which is a movie set in the X-Men universe, however since it's got something of a horror-movie feel to it I may have to treat it as such, especially since it also links to films like "Bird Box", "Glass" and "Mary Shelley". I hope I'm not screwing myself by removing a link today. But hey, that's over 100 films away, and I could have a lot of completely new films on my watchlist by then, so I shouldn't worry about ONE link....
Only I do, I worry about all the links. Even if I do a condensed October chain this year, right now I've got 4 little groupings of two or three films, and no way to stitch them together. Plus, can I really consider "Hotel Transylvania 3" to be a Halloween film? That feels like cheating, but I'm going to do what I have to do if my streak is still going then. Maybe I can finally get to "Coco" too.
THE PLOT: At the dawn of time, when prehistoric creatures and woolly mammoths roamed the earth, Dug and his sidekick Hognob must unite his tribe against a mighty enemy - Lord Nooth and his Bronze Age city - to save their home.
AFTER: When you decide to make a film about cavemen, or probably "primitive men" is the best phrase here, because they're not shown living in caves, the topic lends itself to a thousand jokes, about what they ate, how they discovered fire, how they spent their time, etc. So it's a shame that the makers of this film decided to go "all in" by focusing on football, aka soccer, and theorizing for the sake of humor that soccer is nearly as old as mankind, which it's just not. It's a little cutesy to think that the oddly dodecahedron-shaped core of a meteorite would be an early soccer ball, and people needed to move it around, only it was too hot to touch with their hands. Umm, NITPICK POINT, if it burned their hands, wouldn't it also burn their FEET?
Of course, nothing's meant to be taken seriously here, nobody's saying this is REALLY where soccer came from, or that some early people could be living in the Stone Age while their neighbors were living in the Bronze Age. Umm, that's not how civilization or progress works. If one tribe had any kind of technological advantage over the other, the lesser tribe was wiped out. Watch the opening scenes of "2001: A Space Odyssey" again if you don't believe me. But here they've flipped it, the "good" tribe is the one on the dumber, less-advanced side, and the "bad" tribe is the one that rides on mammoths, has knowledge of metalworking, and lives in a large city, not a sparsely-populated valley. The "good" tribe has forgotten how to play soccer, while the "bad" tribe has a three-level stadium and a team full of star athletes.
But their set-up itself contains the very thing that can defeat them - teamwork and good sportsmanship. Because when every athlete is a star, they're each playing for their own glory, and they're not working together. The underdogs, in true "Bad News Bears" or "Dodgeball" fashion, can beat them by practicing, sharing the ball, and letting girls play. (Oooh, how very P.C.!).
Stop trying to make your weird "football" happen in America, you Brits. It's not going to happen, not here. But I suppose you really made this film for the other 90% of the world that calls soccer football, but I'm betting this movie tanked at the U.S. box office. We're too deep in the pockets of the NFL to even consider changing, but hey, our football's been getting a bad rap lately, with all the players disrespecting the flag and all the team owners consoling themselves with trips to the massage parlor while their players suffer too many concussions on the field. So maybe there's a place for soccer in America, but only at the grade-school level.
Why didn't they record an American version, with the word "football" changed to "soccer"? It wouldn't have cost any more to have each actor record each line twice. You've got to respect the language of the country that a movie airs in, and why foster any more misunderstanding than you have to? It's going to take years for language to change, and even then, you've got to come up with another word for American football, and I've yet to hear any workable solutions for this. Passball? Kickball? No, that's taken. Tackleball? Concussion-ball? No, too on the nose.
I'm a fan of other films from Aardman Animation, like "Chicken Run" and the Wallace & Gromit films, but there's just not much here that appeals to me. Still, I appreciate how much hard work it is to make a stop-motion or claymation feature, it takes years. And then once the story and dialogue is recorded, it can't be changed, because all of the animators have to lip-synch to the dialogue. So it feels like they got locked in here to a story and probably realized too late how lame it all felt.
Also starring the voices of Eddie Redmayne (last seen in "Like Minds"), Tom Hiddleston (last seen in "Crimson Peak"), Maisie Williams, Miriam Margolyes (last seen in "Reds"), Kayvan Novak, Rob Brydon (last seen in "The Trip to Spain"), Richard Ayoade (last heard in "The Boxtrolls"), Selina Griffiths, Johnny Vegas (last seen in "The Brothers Grimsby"), Mark Williams (last seen in "Albert Nobbs"), Gina Yashere, Richard Webber, Simon Greenall, Nick Park.
RATING: 4 out of 10 schnookels
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