Titan A.E. (2000)

For reasons that are never really becoming all that clear or important to the movie, the alien Dredge destroy Earth. The surviving humans become the galaxy’s black people; there will be no actual black people in the movie.

During the flight from Earth, Cale’s (Matt Damon) father left him for some humanity-saving business that apparently didn’t work out too well. Now, fifteen years later, Cale is part of the galactic underclass, doing a crap scavenging job while talking big. He’s a bit of a prick, really, but it turns out a genetically encoded ring his father gave him contains a map leading to the Titan, a spaceship Cale Senior developed that could save the dredges of humanity, somehow, so he is a prick with something useful to offer.

Corso (Bill Pullman), a former associate of his father, drags Cale into the hunt for the Titan; also interested are the Dredge, who haven’t grown any fonder of humanity in the intervening years and want to destroy the Titan and kill Cale. So off into space Cale goes with Corso and his band of misfits. He’s going to fall in love, learn valuable lessons and grow into the hero his father would be proud of.

Because despite this thing having five people listed with story and screenwriting credits – among them genuinely talented ones like Ben Edlund and Joss Whedon – Titan A.E.’s script is about as well-developed as any one-writer first draft screenplay. It’s full of elements that stay completely unexplored, pointless digressions, and a gaping hole where Cale’s actual character development is supposed to be.

There’s certainly a lot going on in the film, but it lacks the energy a good one damn thing after another narrative needs.

The film has a lot of action set pieces, no question, and they are typically decently realized, but they never feel like anything but set pieces inserted into certain places in the plot because that’s where a set piece belongs.

On the animation side, this final direction credit for the great Don Bluth – co-directing with Gary Goldman – is an attempt at marrying digital and hand-drawn animation styles. As is typical of this era, in practice this means that two completely different art styles repeatedly bash into one another, like halves of two different movies colliding, badly. You can often see what the filmmakers were trying to do, but the execution is distractingly awkward. In general, while there are some fine designs on screen, the animation is choppy and a bit disjointed. lacking the flow it needed to make those action set pieces sing.