Artemis Fowl Is Both Extremely Bland and Traumatically Terrifying
After 20 years of development hell, an adaptation of the beloved Young Adult book, Artemis Fowl, is finally here. The film finally showed promise — a class-A director, Kenneth Branagh, was attached to the project and the first teaser felt like an interesting, but proper take on the beloved character, until it got pushed back to May of 2020 and the second trailer made it very clear that Branagh wasn’t following the book and was going to piss off legions of fans in the process. When the COVID-19 pandemic shook the movie theater industry, and Disney decided to dump it on their streaming service, Disney+, instead of a proper theatrical release, signs of the film being a dud were written on the wall. And according to conglomerate Disney capitalists who were trying to convince me that it was the right decision to put a “quality” film such as Artemis Fowl on Disney+ as “financial success” wasn’t guaranteed due to the pandemic, you knew their capitalist mentality were only spinning and they wanted to believe, so hard, that it wasn’t a dud. You can pretend all you want, but Artemis Fowl is one of the dullest films I’ve seen in quite a while and continues Disney’s streak of bad movies they’ve pumped this year.
In the novel, Artemis Fowl II (played in the movie by Ferdia Shaw) is described as “A genius. A criminal mastermind. A millionaire.” Even if Artemis Fowl Jr. (in the movie) says he is a “criminal mastermind” at the end of the film, we never witnessed any real criminal activity, as he kidnaps a fairy (Lara McDonnell) to make a giant dwarf (Josh Gad) enter Fowl Manor so he can retrieve a MacGuffin named the “Aculos” which will save his father (Colin Farrell) from being killed by a “mysterious, shadowed-face, villain who you’ll see in a sequel that’ll never happened” named Opal Koboi (Hong Chau), who wants to use the “Aculos” to…kill a bunch of people and take over the world? Yes? Yes.
It seems as though no one makes family films in which a villain’s intent is to “take over the world”. It’s become incredibly boring, and, as you’ll see in Artemis Fowl, there’s no real sense of visual creativity. Most action sequences run at an incredibly fast-pace, with no sense of direction and/or visual kinetics. We’re subject to visual noise, directed by Aliens who read the book “Action Movies for Dummies”, thinking this is how humans direct action — an overabundance of jump-cuts and quick — almost The Flash, movements that represent “things happening”, but never real, properly choreographed action sequences. It’s as if Olivier Megaton took some LSD mixed with cocaine and decided to experiment with CGI. Remember how truly terrifying “family pictures” like The Adventures of Sharkboy & Lavagirl (2005, Robert Rodriguez) and Son of the Mask (2005, Lawrence Guterman) were when they experimented with “CGI”, giving kids endless nightmares and true mental PTSD? Well, Kenneth Branagh saw those movies and probably said “I can do even worse, and it’s a challenge!”. The fact that Artemis Fowl cost $125 million to make completely dumbfounded me — especially when you see Josh Gad performing his “Dwarfus Giganticus”, in which le largely opens his mouth to tunnel underground so he can chew pieces of earth to build a tunnel. It’s as fucked up and completely wild as you’ve just read — but it’s even worse when witnessed, which is why I won’t dare put up a screenshot here, in case I get sued for traumatizing a young child who was soulfully surfing on the internet, unsupervised, until he saw this:
Yes, this was a carefully elaborate bait, and I truly apologize (not really, you were warned).
This vision of Dante’s Inferno Branagh proposes to us isn’t even the worst, or most terrifying part of Artemis Fowl, as fairies begin to get sucked into what expert drug addicts call a “time-freeze” that warps their head into a quick LSD drug trip only to bring them back into the so-called “real world”, until the drug kicks in once more and the CGI (that was clearly meant to be shown in 3D as plenty of objects come right at you) flies in your face, as Branagh tells you to “Look! Don’t Think!”, when a giant troll leaps into Fowl Manor, Dolittle (2020, Stephen Gaghan & Jonathan Liebesman) style. He not only assaults your eyes with bad CGI, but hides the fact that the film has very little to say (and do), as we spent 90% of the movie inside Fowl Manor, trying to elaborately kidnap a fairy so the army of fairies (or LEPRecons, cuz they irish fairies) arrives to “negotiate”.
And by “negotiate”, Dame Judi Dench graces the screen with her worst performance since badly singing in Tom Hooper’s CATS (2019) (so…her last film), as she says “Top of the mornin’”, after smoking 50 packs of cigarettes and probably reading her lines on-set, looking as bored as Colin Farrell shackled up, having nothing of interest to do, but only remind the audience that he’s a “kidnapped dad” and Artemis must find a way to save him, by finding a MacGuffin inside Fowl Manor with a plan that barely even constitutes a “crime”. So when Ferdia Shaw (with a horribly obvious wig) says that he’s a “criminal mastermind”, to the audience, setting the breadcrumbs for a sequel that will NEVER happen unless Disney runs out of original ideas and decides to produce, for Disney+, Artemis Fowl 2: Electric Opaloo Featuring Dante from the Devil May Cry Series, his biggest crime is robbing us of 95 elongated minutes we’ll never get back. None of it feels urgent or of any interest, since most of the actors are sleepwalking through the movie (the only one that seems to give a damn is Nonso Anozie and Lara McDonnell who was surprisingly not annoying, the only nuisance this film truly has is Josh Gad’s horrible voiceover who describes how brilliant Artemis Fowl Jr. is, without ever showing us his brilliance at being a “criminal mastermind”) reading through a horribly paced script that spends the first 35 minutes of the film plotting Artemis’ rise to the criminal underworld of Fairies, Goblins, Trolls and Dwarves, only to get him stuck in the same house for the entirety of the runtime. Artemis Fowl should be a globetrotting, mini-James Bond (with mythical creatures)-esque film with a large scale to entrap children in its phantasmagorical whimsy, when adapted for the screen, to make kids dream of a fantasy they could very well imaginatively play in recess, but even they’ll dismiss at it, being bored shitless by its world limitations and be traumatized by the dwarfus giganticus. Something no one ever wants to see (unless you’ve read this review lol).
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