If you ever wondered why Epic didn’t
feel engaging, this is my answer
Just as you too can tell from the first
15 minutes, a girl estranged from her crackpot scientist father
discovers that he’s been right all along: there’s a civilisation
of little people and bugs in his backyard. She meets a young leaf man
warrior in training estranged from his adopted father. The entire
civilisation is under threat from a villain and his not-so-estranged
but bumbling and disappointing heir. Meanwhile there’s a little
dandelion flower girl who’s at the age where she should do whatever
grown-up dandelion flower women do. She can’t and though that
doesn’t concern her mum, it does freak her out. The queen of the
civilisation is killed and her magical pod must be protected till the
heir is found.
So much goes on in the first act just
to tell you that the next generation is the locus of all hopes and
anxieties of the previous generation. What happens next is Chris
Wedge and his team somehow forgetting how this premise would
naturally develop the character arc of the 4 protagonists, then
giving them a completely different and unrelated one, and then
writing a conclusion where the solution to their problems... doesn’t
actually rely on resolving inter-generational conflict or growing
into their own.
Epic is a gorgeously animated film that
feels like it has nothing to do with the story being told, and the
story being told feels like it has nothing to do with the characters
who are featured, and the characters being featured don’t seem to
have anything appropriate to do with the crises they face...
The bottom line: Chris Wedge’s
success with his rambling, narrative-free world of his Ice Age
franchise hasn’t prepared him for traditional storytelling at all. Or even the basics of storytelling.
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