Film Friday: Epic

Chris Wedge, of Ice Age fame, has created a new movie, oddly called Epic, which seems to be about the tiny worlds that exist in nature, and whose balance the entire planet needs to maintain or else.  In keeping with this eco-friendly theme, the basic plotlines and characters are recycled from numerous other such animated features of the last fifteen or twenty years. 

MK is a teenager who has apparently recently lost her mother and has now gone to stay with her estranged father. Mom and dad divorced because apparently he was so obsessed with proving that there was a tiny civilization in the forest near their home that she decided he was crazy and left him.  Guess it's not a spoiler to tell you that Dad was right, but he's not the one who really proves it: the girl ends up inadvertently getting involved in the crisis involving the two oppositional forces in the tiny civilizations.  

And so you have the stock characters: the young hero who is extremely gifted but undisciplined; he's commanding officer -- who was the hero's father's best friend; the wise if clownish old scholar; the comical sidekicks (one of whom is probably gay, in keeping with simplistic stereotypes); the villain who is seeking power for little reason other than he's the villain.  You have intermittently exciting special effects, especially if you pay the extra to see it in 3D.  You have a plot very predictable and pretty uncomplicated.  And good triumphs, though as my older kid pointed out, if the villain is destroyed (which seems to be the case, though with all this money being spent it's very likely he will return for a sequel), then balance is actually not restored since you need to have both green and colorful growth AND the decomposition brought on by Rot.  

But then, my oldest is already too old for the demographic that this modestly amusing film is aimed at. The little ones will probably like it, though some of the battle scenes might be too scary.  The adults will ho-hum this one off and wait for the next Superman movie, which, I understand, is coming out soon. (Not that I am sure of that, what with the ads for it all over the entire city...)