Review: Artemis Fowl
Artemis Fowl was a critical part of my childhood, as I'm sure it was for many people my age. I remember reading it in fourth or fifth grade and having it change the way I understood characters. It was one of my first experiences with a protagonist who was morally grey in a grey world and an ending that wasn't necessarily good or bad...just complicated. I loved Holly Short, a woman who never lost her agency or kindness or sheer badassery, even as she was kidnapped and held hostage. Artemis was a fascinating character, and the convoluted heist-like plot structure kept me on my toes and gave a glimpse into his complex mind. It was a challenging book for me at the time, and I was on the younger end of the recommended age spectrum, but I rose to its challenge and thrived on it.
Meanwhile, Kenneth Branagh's Artemis Fowl is an uncomplicated, boring insult to the intelligence of its audience for which it's made, assuming children can only handle by-the-numbers storytelling. Artemis is no longer a young, sociopathic genius; now, he's the kind of kid who tells his dad he doesn't believe in magic, but he wants to believe in his father.
Yikes.
Artemis constantly talks up how smart he is while nothing happens of his own accord. He has no master plan, even though he claims he does. He isn't a mastermind. Rather than outsmarting his opponents, he's having battles with them. He's borderline vapid now, just rolling with the story punches.
And boy, those story punches. Instead of kidnapping Holly as part of a master plan and being unambiguously bad, the Disneyified version of Artemis does it out of convenience and ends up having an obscenely inappropriate "we're friends now" moment with Holly by the end. Because, you know, teaching girls to forgive and become friends with boys who hurt them is a cool thing to reinforce!
The path from Holly being underground to kidnapped is now overworked and predictable for the sake of adding action sequences. The world building suffers, sacrificing the lore for an easier-to-digest, cookie-cutter YA story that's introduced with the grace and delicacy of a bull in a china shop. Every important line or event is overstretched, overemphasized. The plot-heavy scenes are told almost entirely through ADR, as if they didn't even have a story when they started shooting. Instead of an instigating event of Artemis kidnapping Holly, now it's the kidnapping of Artemis Fowl, Sr. by a villain who...wants to wipe out mankind.
How original.
Granted, there are some positives! The scenic cinematography of Ireland at the start is gorgeous, even though it slowly degrades into visual mush by the end. The design of the magical world and costumes is also really great. It's the kind of movie I'd be desperate to cosplay...if it was actually any good. And this whole thing does make me want to read the book again, which is a good thing accomplished for the wrong reasons.
This is just so disappointing, though, because there was hope when the first announcements came out about this movie. The gender- and race-blind casting of Judi Dench and Nonso Anozie was kinda an exciting concept. But, Anozie is given nothing to do but communicate exposition (which is, admittedly, true for every character), and Tamara Smart's role as Juliet Butler is reduced to nothing but getting food for other characters. (Another great thing to reinforce for young girls.) Judi Dench doesn't do much other than growling her lines like an angry old man, which leaves you wondering what the point of her casting even was.
Ultimately, the minorities represented in the movie get even more shafted than the rest of the cast, which is really saying something. On top of how the Butlers are treated, Holly is ruined. Besides all the troubling moments mentioned before, there's an entire fight scene where the elf special agent character has a gadget malfunction and gets stuck to a chandelier so that Artemis and Butler can have the whole fight scene. Juliet, too, promptly gets knocked to the side and spends the fight screaming in fear. Just...great stuff, folks.
The only positive among the characters is, surprisingly, Josh Gad as Mulch Diggums. He manages to get good genuine laughs here and there, with lines that are so good they feel as if he walked into the wrong movie. But, all that gets promptly ruined when he unhinges his jaw to tunnel and gives you an image that instantly robs you of any peace for the rest of your days. (And why is his character human sized? Just because they didn't want to spend extra time and money on forced perspective or CGI? Insane.)
Ultimately, not a single thing in this movie works. Some things work at times, then are just mind-numbingly dumb at others. Frankly, this is the kind of movie that should be a career-ruiner for Branagh as a director. It ruins virtually everything that was excellent in the source material while insulting anyone who spent ninety-five minutes of their one life on planet Earth watching it. If this and The Rise of Skywalker tell us anything about the future of Disney blockbusters, dark times lie ahead.
