Disney’s ARTEMIS FOWL is a Complete Disgrace | Cynical Reviews

husband of Vivienne it's feeding time [Music] this might well be the worst adaptation since Avatar The Last Airbender how is this possible one word Disney I make no secret of the fact that I loathe Disney as a company and now they've given me yet another page to add to my burn book for quite some time now they've been working on an adaptation of Artemis Fowl the popular book series by I I'm not even gonna try and pronounce that about the titular twelve-year-old criminal mastermind and his entanglement with a world of Fae creatures after being stuck in development hell for over ten years where it really should have stayed it was finally squirted onto their streaming service Disney plus a few weeks ago like the diarrhea from an expired kebab and to put it mildly it's a disgrace where to even begin it's awful in almost every respect it's one of the worst adaptations of a source material I've ever seen and it's an utter insult to fans of the books myself included who are rightfully frothing at the mouth it's a complete mess and it feels more like a trailer for a franchise to come than an actual movie now I will admit that the cinematography and set design are pretty great although they should be since this film cost a hundred and twenty five million dollars I know that's pocket change for Disney but gosh dove it what a waste of money and there are little flashes of good ideas and creativity on display but they're like kernels of corn sticking out of a turd because this movie is completely ruined by its presentation it's just off it's hard to describe or put my finger on but imagine that you have a bunch of stuff arranged in a nice pattern on your desk and then some tall comes in and moves everything just slightly imagine that but as a movie this can only be partly attributed to what must have been a difficult post-production and editing process because what the editors were trying to rearrange into something coherent was pretty dreadful to start with the delivery is not engaging at all and it renders the film utterly boring even when the characters are fighting a troll that's tearing through a house how do you make that boring and so for a movie that's only ninety minutes it drags like hell I wasn't surprised in the least to hear that a lot of people couldn't make it past the first twenty minutes because thirty minutes in and only one significant event has happened that's a third of the run time and much of that 30 minutes is taken up by copious amounts of lazy exposition courtesy of Hagrid's annoying cousin with the movie using the device of a character telling the story to an interrogator to attempt to get away with egregiously breaking the show Don't Tell rule as the movie treats even its young target audience like idiots this is only one of a myriad of problems with the writing which is by far the biggest issue I can only think of one example of a joke that made me laugh because it's writing an execution were decent oh my god every other attempt falls flat the dialogue tries to sound intelligent but it's really not it's not perfect but it's ours it's a light to guide us and it's aggravatingly cliched at times you believe then everything I told you but the hellotara what I really want is to believe in you character development where it exists at all is more rushed than an EI development cycle and while I do think the actors try to work with what they were given not even Daniel day-lewis could muster a good performance out of this material while we're on the subject I don't think a single character in this movie was well cast not one take Judi Dench apparently her casting as commander route was a homage to her role as M the head of mi6 in the Bond movies but aside from that I don't know what she's doing here maybe she had a third mortgage that needed paying off or another grandkid who wanted a pony but her performance complete with an awful Irish accent and a 50 cigarettes a day gravelly voice is particularly painful to watch although she did make me laugh the hardest top of the mornin definitely the worst though is Ferdie ashore as Artemus himself he neither looks nor acts convincingly like a genius criminal mastermind and more like the kid who'd get his lunch money stolen and his head flush down the toilet they also managed to get themselves into a bit of hot water with their costing choices in the books officer Holly Short is described as having dark not brown skin of a coffee complexion while here she's more like skimmed milk attracting accusations of whitewashing an autumn is's bodyguard Dhamma void Butler is described as a Eurasian able to pass as both Japanese and Russian so they somehow manage to piss off both sides of that debate but as to the characters themselves they've also been butchered with Artemis in particular being a complete joke the Artemis of the books is indeed a criminal mastermind a cool calculating genius but also with a sympathetic side who goes from being an outright villain to an antihero with a conscience over the course of several books but here he's just another generic smart kid who gets thrust into a new world like every other kid's adventure protagonist director Kenneth Branagh yes that's Kenneth Branagh explained that he made this fundamental change because he didn't think that audiences would accept a twelve-year-old villain which is exactly why the books were so successful because kids couldn't accept the idea of a twelve-year-old villain I think maybe he never stopped method acting after that Mindwipe scene in Harry Potter it's just mind-boggling to me that they decided to change what is arguably the most important aspect of his character and the reason for his appeal in the first place because they thought the audience were stupid so instead we have this boring puny insecure twerp who starts screaming at TV screens because they insulted his dad and then they tried to make him into a criminal at the end but it's poorly established and just ridiculous like you can't not laugh at this as for the other characters there's Judi Dench's commander rout who just looks tired mulch Dickens has gone from being a lovable rogue to being a diabetic Jack Sparrow knockoff and the scene where he tunnels into the mansion is pure nightmare fuel Dom avoid is now called dawn and absolutely hates being called putler despite that being his actual surname in the books Tech Officer Foley is there but isn't does very little and Judith Butler is also there but does basically nothing and may as well not have been in it at all she also randomly and inexplicably comes in and out of the movie like she's shifting through time and space itself but what about the story well the film is an adaptation of the first book with some elements of the second book crudely mashed in what I don't understand is why they didn't just straight-up adapt the first book which was a perfectly self-contained narrative that could easily have been made into a 90-minute movie it was not a tough nut to crack you had something perfectly good right in front of you the hard work was already done so why make all these substantial changes and force these two books together in a way that results in both of them being gutted and while the author did say that he approved of the changes that were made and although in my opinion the word of the original creator is paramount in this regard I can't help but question why some of the changes like swapping the gender of commander route are like fine whatever but others just seem pointless like how the dwarf mulch is now a giant dwarf and they never explained why he's giant and it adds nothing to the story and others were changes for the worse such as everything else I won't go through the plot in detail like I usually do but I will point out some of the issues I had with it I can't list them all because if I did we'd be here until we experience the heat death of the universe and spoilers so if you care about those go 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support the channel that's Nord VPN comm slash cynical reviews links in the description and thanks to Nord for sponsoring all right back to this abomination first off there's the fact that the events are narrated by mulch who wasn't present during some of them so how could he have known about them and not just events he's somehow able to tell us about characters internal monologues and motivations which he would have no way of knowing unless the others sat him down and told him everything which I'm calling bolt on new subplots like holy shorts father being a traitor are brought up abruptly and clumsily like an in sales attempt at a chat up line for some reason they removed Artemis's mother from the story despite her playing an important role in affecting his character and motivations in the book and allowing us to see a more sympathetic side of this dotted Lea character instead the focus is now on rescuing his dad who's no longer a career criminal but instead a good hearted thief who's been stealing from the fairies for decades but somehow this boy genius never caught on to that the villain who kidnaps him is a hollow shell of an antagonist about whom we learn nothing except that she wants to take back the surface world from the humans and she reminds me of the bully hunters mascot she wants Artemis to retrieve a device called the oculus they spend about 30 minutes repeatedly name-dropping this MacGuffin before actually saying anything about what it is by which time most people would have turned off the movie route says that with the oculus gone the entire fairy civilization is in jeopardy although they don't explain why and because the world building is so shallow and the Fae world is so barely explored we don't get a sense of the stakes involved or care rather than appealing to the fairies for help Artemis decides to kidnap one of them Holly short to force them to hand over the oculus which is like kidnapping a police officer to force the government to give you a nuke which is obviously being stupid so the fairies bring an entire army to beseech foul mana to get Holly back which seems like massive overkill and then they deploy a time freeze but as with all the other magic in this world it's not explained and acts inconsistently in an earlier scene in which Holly apprehends a troll the time freeze deploys immediately from a machine with no effects beforehand but this time Artemis observed some effects building up on the seaside before the fairies even arrived from which he deduces that the time freeze is being deployed which makes no sense Dom damages the time freeze and then when root goes in to negotiate Artemis tells her that the time freeze will only apply for another 27 minutes but there's no way he could possibly know that also Artemis keeps threatening that he'll exposed the existence of the fairies to the world but based on what evidence and who's gonna believe him he tells Holly that he knows her name because he read it off her helmet in an earlier scene he said that the fairy language is encoded but then it's never explained how he's able to crack the code in order to read it and he goes from being the smartass posturing hostage-taker to removing his sunglasses that block Holly's mind-control powers in the span of five seconds because she told him that her father died what the fairies can't enter the house without permission because magic again not explained so they get convicted thief mulch to tunnel his way into the house via literal anal evacuation while inside mulch very quickly finds a vault hidden behind a portrait opens it and finds the oculus mulched says that this was part of Artemis's plan but Artemis himself never elaborates on this and how could he knowing that a dwarf would find and be able to open the vault and did he even know that the vault was there in the first place how could this genius not have and the oculus being in the house the whole time is so dumb why did his father not leave any hint as to where the oculus was or just outright say it in the notes he left for him why allow his son to risk provoking an all-out war just to find it oh my god and then for some inexplicable reason Artemus frees Holly why what does he need her for and why does he trust her not to use her mind-control powers on him when she's done nothing to earn that trust in the novel Holly escapes on her own and it makes much more sense and it's just much better in general in fact just just assume that everything is better in the books and you'll be safe and then mulch starts working with them and suddenly they're all buddy buddies now the furries unleash the troll that was captured earlier into the house so we have a mess of an action scene in the book Dom gets mortally wounded but with the help of Holly's healing magic he comes back and takes the troll down and it's such a badass moment but here he gets hurt after pushing this little dumbass out of the way of the falling troll his death scene is three minutes of drawn-out melodrama and since we don't really know much about him it doesn't have much impact and then Holly brings him back so it has even less the time freeze breaks down with multiple cries of it's gonna blow but then why doesn't it damage anything inside of it the faeries get sucked up and thrown around but the house and its occupants are perfectly fine so what was the danger and why can't they just deploy another time freeze and repeat the process over again are they seriously saying that the fairies all just abandoned the oculus the most important relic in their civilization and packed it in for a load of [ __ ] and then Artemis and Holly declare that they are Forever Friends despite hating each other in the books and only working together out of necessity and she helps him use the oculus to teleport his father out of the villains clutches and back to the manor a convenient way of wrapping up that storyline without even leaving the house it also turns out that Holly's father stole the oculus and gave it to autumn is's dad to stop it falling into the wrong hands how would it possibly be safer here oh my commander root says that they now know their enemies even though we still don't and decides to investigate all the names on the list of supposed traitors that Hollies father drew up based on Holly's word alone and no other evidence because she wouldn't be biased in that matter at all molt reveals that Artemis sent him to get captured because he thought that the authorities would believe the story if it came from him which is again a huge and frankly ridiculous assumption and then Artemis is easily able to rescue him from an mi6 top-secret interrogation facility via a helicopter are you kidding me and they all fly off into the sunset to perform more dastardly deeds as Artemis completes his botched metamorphosis into a criminal mastermind setting up sequels that are now as dead as his mum because this movie isn't in a position to please anyone kids are gonna find this boring adults will find it confusing newcomers will find it baffling and fans of the books will find it enraging I do feel bad for the people who worked on it and tried to make it something good but the end result is a complete mess that's a waste of everybody's time and money why even make this if they were gonna butcher it as badly as a pig in a blender there was so much potential here that was utterly wasted I really hope this gets a reboot or a TV show or something because this is Game of Thrones season eight levels of disappointment and I'd really hate for this to be all that fans of the books are left with because Artemis Fowl will now be my go-to example alongside The Last Airbender of a movie that is both a terrible adaptation and a terrible movie in its own right so that's just one more thing from my childhood that Disney has ruined for a quick Bach anymore and I might have to sue them for emotional damage but for now I'll leave you with a quote that perfectly sums up my current mood [Music] tabatha mornin Oh some of you may have noticed that I finally have merch only took me like two years but yes I've been working with the good people over at bonfire to bring you the first ever line of official cynical reviews merchandise we've got t-shirts long sleeves crew necks the always essential hoodies and of course mugs for all of your liquidy needs I'm really happy with the design and the quality and how it's all turned out and this limited edition design will only be available for the next three weeks so if you don't want to miss out head on over to the store page at bonfire comm slash cynical reviews to pick up some apparel that's guaranteed to get you laid no it's a nine point nine percent guarantee for legal reasons but it does also help support the channel so there's that anyway it's there if you want it and once again thanks for watching special thanks again to all of my backers on patreon your support goes a long way in helping these videos get made if you like what I'm doing here and want to support the channel more directly consider becoming a patron yourself thanks as well to crimson rogue for sharing his very useful notes on the film and book he's a cool dude and he's got a great channel so go check him out also thanks once again to the Kino corner for his editing help he makes videos about movies too so go give him a watch I streamed semi-regularly over on Twitch so follow me at twitch TV slash cynical reviews official if you're interested in hanging out join my public discord server and follow me on social media to stay up to date and I'll see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Cynical Reviews

Views: 790,992

Keywords: Cynical reviews, cynical cj, artemis fowl, artemis fowl movie, artemis fowl 2020, artemis fowl review, artemis fowl movie review, artemis fowl 2020 review, Disney, Disney+, eion colfer, Disney movie, Movie Review, Film, Film Review, cynical reviews Artemis Fowl, Artemis, Fowl, Artemis Fowl Book, Film Adaptation, Worst Adaptation, Avatar The Last Airbender, Colin Farrell, Movie, Commentary, Critique, Satire, Parody, Criticism, Comedy, Review, Movies, artmis fowl, artems fowl, ad, artmis, fol

Id: suDYfQSqPSo

Length: 18min 21sec (1101 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 09 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/ragnar_xp]

Made me laugh all the way through.

[u/chtili1]

hell yeah

[u/InquisitorGoldeneye]

And not one pun about what a 'fowl' film it was.

I'm so proud of you!

[u/[deleted]]

I haven’t seen the video yet, but watching this movie made me feel personally insulted. I can’t wait to hear you tear it to shreds

[u/urrigongreyjoy]

Thanks for shouting out krimsonrogue mate,he really needs more subs.