Titan A.E. - 1 star out of 10

Titan A.E. - 1 star out of 10

"Titan A.E." was doomed from the start.  I know that Don Bluth is forever competing with Disney, but when you are trying to make something comparable to "Treasure Planet," you do not have very good odds.  Where to begin with this bland display of animation?  I think that the root of the problem is the characters.  When your villains are glowing balls of energy, there isn't really anywhere to go with that.  Toss in a static, 2-dimensional hero (no pun intended) with a love interested that is based on seeing an animated chick in a towel and we aren't really getting anywhere.  It just gets worse from there, as I try to contemplate why they felt it necessary to throw in an obnoxious character.  Gune is the most annoying character since Gurgi in "The Black Cauldron."  He really serves no purpose for the majority of the film, and just when you think it's safe to celebrate his death and subsequent disappearance from the remainder of the film, he returns to save the day, but his TRUE purpose is to annoy us some more.  It's scary how much he parallels Gurgi and yet the writers still wrote him into the script.  Now, for the story.  It is good in concept but grows very tiresome for the first half of the film.  It's cheesy and for some reason, it felt the need to include a long 1980's montage of him flying the ship.  That whole sequence was reminiscent of a remote control car commercial where they're trying to get to get kids to jump around the room and pretend that they're the ones flying the ship so that they'll go out and buy a cheap toy.  And we won't even discuss what the spaceship resembles!  Just when you think that the film is going to continue on a downward spiral, it hits you with one of the best twists that I've ever seen in an animated movie!  ...And 20 minutes later, they use the same twist again?  Nevermind, the movie still sucks.  And the find time to throw in ANOTHER 1980's montage as everybody unites to fix a spaceship with a pop song in the background.  Seriously?  Everything fit together well at the end of the film, but the journey to get to that point was rough.  I had high expectations for a film with Matt Damon, Nathan Lane, John Leguizamo, and Bill Pullman as the voice actors.  But in the end, all that I realized that Drew Barrymore has a terrible voice for a non-comedic role.  The animation is quality, particularly all of the anti-gravitational animation as half of the animation moves in slow motion and the other half doesn't.  It was also nice to see that these animators weren't afraid to show a little bit of blood in a PG movie.  I do take issue with that fact that too much of this film was computer animated.  If you want a hand-drawn animated feature and include some cool CGI effects (like Mulan and The Lion King), I love to see the director to enhance particular scenes using that resource.  But to have the majority of the film be computer animated and then just draw the characters on top of it was annoying - they should've just made the entire thing computer animated.  And now I should end my rant because the movie is bad but not as bad as the picture that I am painting.  I just know that I will never allow my children to see this movie, for fear that they would think it's cool and want to watch it all of the time.