The Unseen Movie Review

Robots

Cute character design? Check. Male and female leads for a bit of love interest? Check. Occasional movie references? Check. Yet another computer-animated movie with a big-name cast which is trying to appeal to adults as well as their kids? Surely not!

The big-name stars here are Ewan McGregor and Halle Berry, with the help of the likes of Robin Williams, Greg Kinnear, Mel Brooks, Jim Broadbent and Drew Carey. But oddly, despite McGregor being in the lead and the story being set in a bizarre world populated entirely by robots, his voice is practically unrecognisable due to a combination of one of his Big Fish-style American accents and an apparent attempt to imitate Tobey Maguire’s creaky, geeky tones from the Spider-Man movies. Why get in a big name if no one will realise it’s him? Still, this is a kids’ film, after all – the voices are meant to be slightly silly.

This is a fairly typical tale of an innocent country boy going to the big city, meeting some dodgy types and the girl of his dreams, making it big, and showing the dodgy city types the error of their ways. Albeit with an odd-looking mechanical country boy and a city populated with cybernetic swindlers. It’s all nicely-done stuff, with a decent amount of visual invention chucked in to the fairly standard storyline. The cross-city transport system which seems based on some kind of elaborate executive stress toy is a particularly nice touch, and the various cyborg characters are all lovingly detailed in their design.

But the danger with a film like this which is so reliant on technological expertise, and especially with one in which all the characters are machines, is that the scientific wizardry will get in the way of the storyline. What is always needed is a firm guiding hand in the shape of a director who knows precisely what they are trying to achieve. With the directorial team of Chris Wedge and Carlos Saldhana, of Ice Age fame, such a guiding vision is only to be expected. If they can make fluffy creatures wandering around an icy wasteland trying to avoid extinction appealing, surely they can manage it with robots?

Sure enough, while this is certainly no Incredibles, Wedge and Saldhana –aided and abetted by their starry cast – have managed to produce another very likeable children’s film. But that, sadly, is pretty much all it is. There is very little here to appeal to the adults, the humour being largely infantile and slapstick and, despite the big names and a few vague stabs as some in-jokes, there is none of the knowing humour of the likes of Antonio Banderas’ self-mocking turn in Shrek 2. Which is a bit of a shame, but still. What we’ve ended up with instead is a perfectly good way to amuse the kids for a couple of hours, and that’s always got to be worth something.

posted by Nosemonkey @ 12:00 AM