Artemis Fowl

Artemis Fowl is the most recent film by Disney’s live-action studio—the studio that gave us The Jungle Book (2016), The Lion King (2019), Pirates of the Caribbean, and the upcoming Mulan. It is directed by critically acclaimed actor-director, Kenneth Branagh, who is most known for his adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays and classic murder mysteries. It is adapted from a highly successful children's book series, and had a budget of $125 million… so why does it feel like a knock off of Spy Kids from 2001?

This film would not have survived in theaters. Global pandemic or not, the box office would have been laughable. I am guessing Disney knew this film was a failure from the start, with the sparse advertising and quick jump to abandon it on Disney+. The blockbuster market has been considered “too big to fail” multiple times, and it looks like Disney truly believes that statement. Out of all the major studios today, Disney is the most likely to start a project before realizing the collapsing returns of its result. There is a reason most projects pouring out of Disney’s live-action department are remakes of animated classics. The “originals”—they all are still adaptations from books—stumble within the first week in theaters (The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (2018), A Wrinkle in Time (2018)). I fail to see why this branch of Disney continues this mistake, because it definitely is not the promise of money. If it were, this film would have been pushed back like every other blockbuster this year—even the infamously delayed, unwatchable The New Mutants, now owned by the same studio, was pushed back for the fourth time instead of being released to Disney+. It is clear that the final cut of this film was seen as a failure by its creators in terms of possible revenue, but it feels like that was even the case during the production.

Kenneth Branagh is one of the directors I admire the most. His adaptation of Hamlet is fantastic. He knows how to create the craft of a film with the soul of a written story. He knows how to talk to actors and bring out their brightest qualities. Yet in this film… the actors walk around aimlessly, as if there are no marks or beats given to them as they stand in front of a rolling camera. The actor on the center stage is a 16-year-old kid from Ireland… who has never acted before. I am not blaming the poor acting on him, though, because the director is an A-list actor, and the budget and connections this film had should be able to hire the right actor for that role. It should be able to get that right. Now, looking back at the main actor of Aladdin, and The Lion King, this department has had similar problems with bland leading actors. Fortunately, the child acting does not detract from the story, since the script has nothing to offer.

The final blow that struck this film down was the editing. Sure, the script is nothing special, but the CGI is passable, and the production team should be able to save some scenes with good action or fun actors. But that did not happen. The actors are given nothing to build off of, and the action scenes are the worst scenes in the entire film. It is the editing, though, that makes this film unwatchable. Some shots have frames cut out to speed them up, distorting a casual action into a delirious jumble of motion, which is most frequent during the action scenes. Other scenes are cut short before the emotion can catch up with what is happening, and many events are concluded off screen and brought back into the fray within two seconds. Half of the film bores with stale exposition, while the other half explains nothing, making me utterly confused as I watch a kids movie derail in front of my eyes. The emotional beats are shortened to make a faster runtime, and the tension is forgotten in order to get to the next scene. The whole execution feels like the editor said, “Why should the audience care about the character’s goals and motives when instead they can see what happens with the other characters we won’t develop?” It just feels like no one wanted to work on this film, but Disney spent so much money on it that it could not possibly fail, but then it did.

There are two good elements to this film. The music takes the basic approach to young-adult action film-scores, but it adds Irish pipes and strings to make it more folky and upbeat. The best moments of the score are at the beginning, when it glides through the Irish coast, bringing some fun scenery before the story starts. The other good element is Josh Gad. He has the Disney-actor-contract narrowed down to a tee. His performance is not groundbreaking, nor does he stretch out of his comfort level. He knows exactly what his role is, and coasts through each scene with solid humor to collect the paycheck at the end. There was one scene that I scored above a 3, and it solely stemmed from Josh Gad’s ability to make comedy without relying on the script.

Overall, this film can distract kids during this chaotic time, but only for a brief 95 minutes. Putting it on Disney+ is the best opportunity for this film to get any attention, and a lot of the negative press has put it in a spotlight it would never have received in theaters. It feels like Kenneth Branagh gave up on this project as soon as he got the script, which makes me hesitant on any of his future projects. Do not watch this film. Do not give it the revenue for a possible profit, because it is not a “so bad it’s good” film. It is a confusing mess that rushes to the credits so it can leave you and forget it even existed.

The most telling part about this film is how many "scenes" occur within only 95 minutes. That makes each scene, on average, only 67.2 seconds.

The grand average score calculated from the 107 scenes:

3.6/10