I was almost afraid that the reception of this movie from almost
Every single critic on the planet would leave me in a very strange seat, where I would come to find myself
Relating to the main character. Much like Gene, I was sent into this film expecting to react to every single
situation with a "meh"
Much like how Gene is shunned in his community for being able to emote past that one face that he has been designated,
There was a chance that I might be shunned by fellow reviewers if I were to talk about this film with anything
But that exact same tone. And much like him by not following this standard
I could possibly disrupt everything that I held dear. The main thesis of The Emoji Movie
Seems to be that there are some moments in life that simply can't be represented
By just one face, one shade, one emotion, and I think that walking out of the movie
I truly understood and embraced this feeling because this movie made me feel a lot more than just,
"meh." I felt unamused
Angry, tired,
pensive, face with rolling eyes and most importantly
Sony Pictures have started to feel a lot like it's my crack-addicted ex-girlfriend at this point.
Sure I forced myself on more than one occasion to stand by as they keep making terrible choices that ends with
everything in ruins;
But I keep coming back to them under the hopes that they'll eventually find the means to do anything right.
Maybe I just want to see them pull through and prove the critics wrong!
Or maybe I'm just hoping that they get their shit together before they do that Robotech film, who knows?
I do want to say before I get into all of this that there were clearly people
Involved in this film who wanted it to be good; People who sought to take the corporate
Percentages used to incentivize the film's creation, and somehow transfer that into something
palatable through pure gumption. And the sad fact is that none of these attempts truly work, because the premise itself is too stupid and
overplayed to really hook many members of the audience in.
I've come to see The Emoji Movie as a lot like a tornado, or a hurricane.
It's one thing to be horrified by the destruction caused in its wake,
and another to blame the people who got sucked into it.
The Emoji Movie has a plot so unoriginal and stapled together
that I have no doubt in my mind that I will be able to illustrate all of the movie simply by using clips from other similar films.
Now there's something to be said for two different products using the same basic ideas and taking them in completely different directions.
For instance, there's this minor debate that people seem pretty insistent on having.
About if as Osmosis Jones or Inside-Out does that very specific concept better.
And the answer to that quandary is... of course,
Why are you comparing a cop drama to an allegory for depression?
However that separation between similar movies only starts to be true when the ideas have a sort of new perspective.
Duplications in the market tend to be an issue when both versions have the same intentions,
the same mood, the same themes, the same means for illustrating their plot.
That's when it starts being a problem.
The Emoji Movie dares to ask:
What would it be like if something we take for granted actually existed within its own world which sought to sustain our needs by building a complex society,
Which merely imitates how humans perceive such things to work?
However, our main character, a "meh" named Gene, is tired of this repetitive lifestyle;
Due to how it makes him put on a face and not emote how he truly feels.
And so our main character decides to go outside of his designated area to other locations in this environment;
Dedicated to things within the same genre as his world.
In this fish out of water adventure, our hero is joined by a goofball sidekick
who proves to be oddly useful in very small ways, and they eventually meet the third member of the team:
A hipster nonconformist who views the accepted society of her own species to be boring. Only to learn through
experiences with the main character that there's nothing wrong with dancing.
Meanwhile, while viewing the real world through a special screen,
The higher-ups in the society are discovering that the effects of this film may lead to the destruction of everything that they hold dear.
Eventually the three return to the society which shunned them, to prove that their specified
disposition can be useful if treated the right way.
There are very few moments in this film, that don't feel copied from somewhere else.
There's this one set of scenes set inside a Candy Crush app, and it's so
obviously an attempt to copy the candy world from Wreck-it Ralph, but it's just far less inspired or justified.
I don't see why candy crush would have a huge candy themed area.
Why would there be a fully modeled pathway in the app if the glass screen is the only thing that ever works?
Why would some pathway include candy that is not in Candy Crush?
Then there's this huge chunk in the middle of the movie that's set inside a Just Dance application,
and to get out the main characters have to dance along with this Christina Aguilera Barbie doll, and the whole time
I was thinking to myself:
"How would Just Dance work on an iPhone?"
Now I should probably stop to mention the subplot outside of the phone.
All about the phone's user, who has a crush on a girl in his class named Addy.
Alex tries to emotionally sway Addy into going to a school dance with him, through the means of finding the right emoji to send.
I don't know what to say about this plotline, other than the fact that I'm just frankly not invested in it.
I feel like making a movie about the emotional imbalances inside a brain, lets you explore a lot of ideas and different situations
That, that are very interesting and unique;
But a movie about what happens when you select an emoji on your phone;
That's not really going to be able to explore anything other than the people that you text on a day to day basis.
In the theater I felt like I was being forced to read the private text messages between
two awkward teenagers that I didn't know.
The Emoji Movie seems to teeter on wanting to appeal to teenage demographics while also
actively hating everything about those demographics.
There's constant jokes about low attention spans, jabs at people who use Twitter and Facebook
while also embracing those people because you know you need the ads.
It constantly feels like every idea in the script is being fought over by two of the writers,
yanking it from one side of the table to the other at random.
Perhaps one of the most confounding elements of the movie is our leading lady:
Jailbreak.
Jailbreak apparently openly resents that she was created to be a princess emoji.
Leading her to decide to become a hacker emoji instead.
The moral here Is that you shouldn't let society tell you what you can and cannot be.
Especially if it's based entirely on gender stereotypes.
Yet throughout the movie the lesson that she's apparently supposed to learn is that
SHE is supposed to go back to being a generic princess whenever it proves essential to the plot.
Leading to an increasingly insulting moment where in she whistles to summon a 3D model of the Twitter logo.
(God damn if you didn't see the movie you must think i'm making this shit up.)
In one amazingly frustrating scene Gene admits to Jailbreak that his time with her has made him
Comfortable with being himself.
When he seemingly admits that there are romantic intentions in what he is saying,
she turns him down.
Which causes him to turn gray and revert to the "meh" Emoji that he was supposed to be in the first place.
As he leaves Dropbox, all right, this doesn't sound like a real movie when I'm describing right now.
So Jailbreak then blames herself for Gene turning back into a "meh," because she hadn't told him
everything about how she felt?
Apparently she only turned him down
because she didn't want to end up playing the gender roles of the fairy tale because she doesn't like the fact that she's a princess.
But even if she does like him, the grander point here should be that Gene's will to survive and ultimate happiness
shouldn't be based around whether or not his crush likes him or not.
But the movie seems to think that the moral is that Jailbreak should go and
apologize and that she should have blindly accepted him the moment
He said anything whether she had romantic intentions towards him or not.
And it was during this consideration of whether it was
misogynistic to have a character return to being a princess
Love interest simply out of guilt;
That I remembered that almost none of this mattered in the first place.
The Emoji Movie doesn't work, because
emojis are not interesting enough to make a movie out of.
There's something justifiable in asking what it would be like if toys were alive.
Because most toys come packaged with character and voice.
You pick up a Woody doll, and you immediately connected to all the characteristics that Tom Hanks gives it.
If you pick up an emoji pillow, you will never find yourself connecting it to anything other than the face
It's making or this specific thing that it represents.
And that doesn't just affect the characters in the movie;
It shows up in things like the marketing, the designs, everything.
It's like someone was working on Monsters, Inc. Drew Mike Wazowski, and then said "Well, we're done.
Just copy and paste that a couple times."
You could make a movie about what it's like to be a dog, because dogs are fun, and fun to be around!
You can make a movie about what it's like to be in a video game because those are packed with creativity and ingenuity.
You can make a story about Legos because Legos are designed to make stories out of.
You can't make a movie about a smiley face.
Cuz it's a goddamn smiley face!
The Emoji Movie is someone trying to write a thousand words on an image that is used as a means to type out fewer words.
It's someone attempting to interject specific genders, characteristics, and emotions to symbols meant to be
used in any situation happening on the planet Earth at any time.
It's an attempt to get me invested in the lives of characterless, orange spheres that exist to help strangers figure out when I'm being ironic.
The Emoji Movie never had a chance of being much of anything to anybody.
It didn't have the tools to even consider trying this.
I would bring myself to pity it if it weren't making so much money.
Because this movie even making a small portion of its production cost back,
Means that Sony won't be learning its lesson anytime soon.
That's all you need.