Topic: Movie thread.

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Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs - Saw this after seeing the second Ice Age sequel, The Meltdown. I actually kind of binge watched the Ice Age sequels earlier last week (despite the consensus that the films get increasingly worse plot and writing-wise with each installment) and this is the next one I watched.

In this sequel, the main characters, travel to an underground land inhabited by dinosaurs after Sid takes three seemingly abandoned dino eggs and is subsequently kidnapped by the eggs’ mother and taken away to this dangerous world.

A lot of people say this sequel was worse than The Meltdown, but if I’m being honest, I kinda liked this more than the previous one, though I’ll admit I probably feel this way because I liked Buck’s character a lot and the creativity with the dino land, as well as the subplot with Scrat finding a love interest.

I really liked the animation on this one, and I think this is where the animation in the Ice Age movies starts to get really better. I was a bit shocked at how much the animation improved, especially since this was released a few years after the second film. It holds up well for a late 2000s movie, and I especially liked the way Buck was animated. Some of his flexible animation in certain parts reminded me a bit of rubberhose animation, so that was nice.

The dino world was also something I really liked. It’s super creative and so visually stunning when the film introduces it for the first time. One part I remember was this part where Manny and Diego get stuck inside a plant with deadly acid, and the plant had these red and blue vines Buck had to cut to shut off the plant, and I really liked how creative that part was.

Then there was also the subplot with Scrat, which was also kind of a standout for me. In this one, he also falls into the dino land by accident, and meets another squirrel named Scratte, and after that, a bunch of romantic antics ensue. Their subplot was so silly and stupid I liked it a lot. I’d say that Scrat’s segments in the films still manage to be consistently good, and provide a bit of nice comedy without dialogue, and right at the end it kind of becomes a stupidly weird and hilarious love triangle with Scrat, Scratte, and the acorn.

Though, I didn’t think this one was funny as well. It was funny at some times, but also not really. There were two jokes that did catch me off-guard, that being Sid’s silhouette when he was hugging the dino eggs and a small scene with Scrat and Scratte on a tree branch. I think that a a lot of the Ice Age movies aren’t real knee-slappers, but they do have maybe one or two funny jokes occasionally, or a few that catch you off-guard.

Ice Age: Continental Drift - Yes, there’s a million more Ice Age movies left. I honestly didn’t like this one a lot compared to the previous one, and I feel like this is where the movies begin to get worse in terms of unoriginality, jokes and get so random.

In this one, Scrat accidentally causes Earth’s continents to break apart and drift away from each other, separating the main three and Sid’s granny away from their home and the rest of their family. As they try to find their way back home, they encounter and fend off a group of pirates that disrupt their trip back home.

Again, the animation is good and I feel like that as the Ice Age movies go on, the animation gets increasingly better and more detailed. The environments also become a standout with the animation making them look soft and detailed.

But, this movie has an unoriginal plot and cliches. My main issue came from the relationship between Manny and his teenage daughter Peaches. It’s so cliched and unoriginal, and it’s that type of story where the dad doesn’t want his daughter to grow up or hang out with this group of friends that he thinks are bad influences, then the daughter and dad argue and the daughter doesn’t think her dad understands her. That type of story has been done to death so many times, you can just predict what happens at the end, and then I also think one of the newer characters, Shira, is super cliched as well, since she is a bad guy at first but then Diego convinced her to leave the pirates after it turns out that their captain doesn’t care about her going missing when they lose their ship, not to mention the captain treats her badly when she fails to kill Diego.

I also think the pirates were a random addition. They did try to make them fit by making their ship a gigantic piece of broken ice and making it made out of natural resources rather than be an actual pirate ship, but I still think pirates are not fitting for the setting and premise of the movie, and it feels like they were solely there so there would be conflict besides the world drifting apart.

Also, this wasn’t funny either. Compared to how Dawn of the Dinosaurs had a few funny jokes and scenes, I didn’t really laugh and the jokes seemed focused more on stuff like vomiting, random stuff and kind of nothing else. Again, like The Meltdown, I thought Scrat’s segments were more funny than actual spoken jokes.

Ice Age: Collision Course - This is considered the worst Ice Age movie out of them all. Gave it a watch, and I think it’s the weakest and most unoriginal Ice Age film.

Scrat unearths a UFO encased in ice, and when attempting to get his acorn back in space, he accidentally launches a destructive meteor toward Earth, which will collide in a few days time and cause all the animals to die and go extinct (kind of like how dinosaurs went extinct in real life), so the main group goes on a journey to avert the potential collision.

Again, animation is really good here. It’s very good once again and the best looking in the franchise so far, and there are some parts that look very fun with the animation. I think the animation shines the most during Scrat’s segments in space. The space environments look beautiful, and we’re done very well. There was this part where his UFO keeps bumping into planets, which light up when he collided with them, resembling pinball, which looked really fun. Another one being the part where Buck rescues a dino egg; that was very energetic, zany, and animated really well.

It’s the best Ice Age sequel in terms of animation, but, kind of ironically, the sequel with the worst writing and plot. The plot is cliche once more, and it’s with Manny and Peaches AGAIN. This time, she’s getting married to a kinda annoying and unfunny mammoth, and she’s drifting away from him and Ellie and getting closer to her fiancé, not to mention Manny personally dislikes Peaches’ soon-to-be-husband for no reason. This is another cliche plot and I just WISH they’d stop with these dad and daughter cliches since they’ve been done a million times before, not to mention the previous film did a similar plot like this before. There is also these small subplots where Sid gets dumped by his girlfriend and feels lonely (especially since Manny is married and Diego got together with Shira), and Diego and Shira unintentionally scare off some children and don’t want to be seen as scary, but this is random and kind of go nowhere at all, kind of similar to how The Meltdown also had extremely random subplots that had no bearing on the plot.

And another criticism, the main cast is bloated at this point. The films each introduce a lot of characters into the main group (usually 1 or 2) but it’s gotten too big to the point the cast is unfocused they don’t get enough screen time, and it seems like they don’t really do anything. Any character that aren’t the mammoths, Sid, maybe Diego, and Buck are just there and have little presence in the film, which I felt was especially the case with Shira, Sid’s granny, Crash and Eddie. I feel like the films should have stopped adding characters after introducing Ellie, Crash, and Eddie, because the cast felt balanced in The Meltdown and Dawn of the Dinosaurs.

The film introduces new characters who live inside of a gigantic anti-aging geode, but they don’t even really do anything besides providing a ton of unfunny jokes, and the anti-aging thing also does nothing with the plot; I bet you that they were only put in there for comedy and wacky hijinks…which aren’t funny at all. One of those new anti-aging characters is a sloth named Brooke, but she’s introduced too late into the film and rarely gets any screentime, so it makes Sid’s proposal to become her boyfriend rushed (though funnily enough the film actually acknowledges that, meaning the writers were fully aware the proposal happened too fast).

Also, the UFO is unfitting, far more unfitting than the pirates in Continental Drift. I don’t know why they introduced technology and UFOs into Ice Age, I assumed to fuel the conflict and make Scrat’s segments funnier, but I read they were inspired to use the UFO in this because of a scene from one of the previous films, which I don’t even remember. I know it’s fiction, but I still think the UFOs and space were an unnecessary addition to the world and don’t suit the icy setting or the films being centered on extinction and natural disasters.

Was very disappointed with this one, and it’s not good compared to some of the previous films. I have The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild after this…I’m expecting that to be bad unfortunately.

They are making a 6th film releasing late next year, and although I think the movies have gotten too cliched and unfunny, I am curious to see how they’ll do 6, especially since it’s being done by Fox’s animated film studio and not Blue Sky (since they closed back in 2021), so I’d assume a mostly different team and director are attached to it. Hopefully they’ll attempt to make that less cliche…