It's something that's been on my to do list for a long time now. As a big fan of the series I was over the moon to hear an actual CG movie was being created as this is one of the few video game franchises out there that feels like it COULD transition naturally to film if it wanted to as it basically is the video game equivalent of Futurama. (Which already does transition pretty well into direct to dvd movies.)
I was really disappointed when I read nothing but bad reviews about the film when it finally came out and honestly after watching it, it's easy to agree with them.
The movie isn't terrible but it isn't good in anyway shape or form either. It's sadly just one of those films thats clearly written for kids and exists solely for parents to drag them to the cinema and keep them quiet for an hour and a half.
The best film I can compare this to is Blue Sky's Robots with Robin Williams. It's on that same level of writing, though the CG sadly isn't as interesting to look at.
The whole experience just reeks of 'ok at best'.
My biggest complaint with the film is the way the characters are portrayed. Unlike Robots, these aren't characters made specifically for a movie, these are already established characters from a franchise thats been doing well on playstation for over a decade now and sadly they're incredibly watered down.
Ratchet and Clank are just plain boring protagonists. It's interesting that Ratchet finally has a backstory and a mentor figure that's somewhat similar to John Goodman's Sully from Monsters Inc, and Clanks backstory is portrayed in a little more detail but still, is really uninteresting and really goes nowhere in the story.
The characters have no chemistry between them and are pretty much separated throughout half of the movie anyway, which to me boggles the mind.
The biggest aspect of the Ratchet and Clank series was always the bond the two characters share as they basically work side by side to save the galaxy from peril time and time again, but if your first exposure to the series was from this film, you wouldn't even guess they were friends to begin with.
Basically imagine watching Monsters University with the 3rd act completely cut out. You'd never guess Mike and Sully were ever friends and it's a similar deal here.
Captain Qwark is the film's only real comic relief and sadly he's pretty uninteresting as well.
He's portrayed as more of a dumb jock who loves being head of a fraternity rather than a celebrity who will do anything to keep up the image that he IS a celebrity.
In the original series Quark was always portrayed as this adored intergalactic hero/celebrity who was really in Chairman Drek's pocket the entire time and never was the hero he claimed to be, but in this retelling of the story he's basically part of a team of heroes who easily turns on his team mates and sabotages their ships in order to be spared and offered fame and admiration.
It's nowhere near as interesting and just makes him out to be an asshole rather than a goofy but loveable sellout who was convinced in his own head that he's a hero because everyone else in the galaxy was.
Chairman Drek sadly gets it the worst out of all of them however. He was my personal favorite villain in the series and one who I considered worthy enough to be placed in a top 20 video game villains list I wrote a few years ago.
He was portrayed in the original game as a no nonsense, ruthless business tycoon, ruling an empire and basically destroying an entire galaxy simply to profit from it.
Taking the best parts of other planets to build a luxury planet that rich aliens would pay a fortune to want to live or own land in really made an interesting premise for a video game antagonist but in the movie he's sadly watered down to just being a generic Saturday morning cartoon villain who's merely evil for the sake of being evil.
His design is different, his voice actor, personality, attitude, all of it replaced with something less interesting and far less threatening for the 6-10 year old audience this film is clearly aiming for.
The film never even goes into the villain's motivation or why they're doing what they do.
They're just merely being evil for the sake of being evil and that's all you really get out of them.
Dr. Nefarious is in this movie as well, portrayed as a side villain working for Drek, though he's portrayed as an alien scientist helping to build Drek's army as opposed to a robot overlord with a personal butler assistant who wants to wipe out all organic life from the galaxy so he can rule over the robot race.
Sadly he's not interesting either, he's basically a green alien version of Mandark from Dexter's Laboratory.
The only interesting character in this entire movie is Ratchet's boss and mentor, who I think was played by John Goodman. (I admit I never stuck around for the end credits.)
He's basically just Sully from Monsters Inc. as a mechanic but he does make for an interesting mentor character and sadly the ONLY good character in the entire film.
The Plumber does make a brief cameo though he doesn't say or do anything of any interest in the film and if you weren't already aware of him from the games, you wouldn't even recognise him anyway as he's merely just a background character surrounded by a group of people trying to get Ratchet's autograph when he joins the Galactic Heroes.
As you might of guessed, the keyword I keep bringing up in all of this is interest and this movie lacks it in spades.
There's honestly no reason to really even bother seek it out unless you're a die hard fan who's curious enough and can spare 90 minutes or if you really just want some backstory into the PS4 game, which I'm sadly now concerned to play as it's basically a tie in to this movie rather than being an updated retelling of the original story, which in my opinion was far more interesting.
Hopefully I'm wrong on that as I know all the original stages are explored in the game but I fear it's the former rather than the latter as I know they're using the new Drek over the old one.
Alas.
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7 years, 2 months ago
15 Feb 2017 21:00 CET
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