Phillip Reviews: The Emoji Movie (2017) [-sigh-...)
Phillip873 Warning: This review contains SPOLIERS!!!So, I recently watched the emoji movie with some family, sort of as a joke (but my mom wanted to see if it was good). I gotta tell you, my expectations for this were SO LOW, that it didn't feel that terrible (will talk about it later), when it in fact one of the worst animated movies I've seen! Let's begin.
Plot Summary:
"Gene [played by T.J. Miller], a multi-expressional emoji, sets out on a journey to become a normal emoji."
- Source: IMDb
The Story:
Jeez, what a mess the story is. So from what I understand, this movie is about an emoji named "Gene" who lives in a town called Textopolis where all the emojis live, is supposed to be a "meh" emoji, as that was the role in life given to him. He unfortunately cannot be a "meh" as he expresses multiple emotions, so he must find a way to become a "meh" emoji with the help of "Hi-5" and hacker "Jailbreak". First off, this whole movie's premise makes zero sense. Gene apparently has parents who are also "meh" emojis, but there is only one "meh" emoji to be used for our human character Alex. What happens to the other emojis?! That is just one of the many problems with this movie's world building. It's so poorly done that you can't really focus on the plot itself, because you're left with all these questions in your head. So since Gene makes the "wrong face" on his first day because he has more than one emotion, he has to run away and is going to be killed. He goes on a quest to become the "meh" emoji. Honestly, if that sounded stupid enough, the girl emoji jailbreak is a princess who didn't want to be a princess. I can't really blame the writers of the story, because when you're dealing with a concept of an "emoji movie", it's hard to NOT make a story that sounds so stupid! The writing is also very lazy. The trio has to go through the apps in Alex's phone to get to Dropbox. It's incredibly stupid they are going through these apps when you can clearly see they can GO AROUND THEM! It's funny, because they literally do this later to run away from the deleter things, just so it's convenient to the plot. Also why couldn't Jailbreak just fly the Twitter Bird (yeah this ACTUALLY happens... because she's a princess...) with Gene and Hi-5 to Dropbox, because it's shown later she can fly it anywhere in the phone. Anyway, the whole story is just a mess of lazy, unoriginal writing, unfunny jokes, and badly contrived plot devices only put in the movie just to move the plot forward. The ending was just icing on the cake. To save the phone after Alex starts deleting it, Gene sends out an emoji that can change faces to Alex. Apparently this is SO COOL to him, that he stops deleting his phone data just to send it to the girl he likes to see if she will go to the dance with him. In the video "I Hate The Emoji Movie" by YouTuber "I Hate Everything", he also showed that when Alex sends the girl he likes the face-changing emoji, she actually approaches him and says... "I like that you're one of those guys who can express his feelings." WOW......
I was genuinely dumbfounded at that scene, at how incredibly FORCED it was! What kind of woman automatically likes a guy over a little texting face you send over text message? ABSOLUTELY NO SANE PERSON! Teens are not that easily won over! Gosh, what a horribly put together story. As for the humor, it's painfully unfunny, I literally remember ONE joke that was kind of funny. It was a joke just making fun of internet trolls, but it wasn't gut bustingly funny. The rest of the humor is cringe-worthy at it's worse. This story sort of rips off other good animated movies, but I will talk about that in my "Extra Thoughts" section later.
The Animation/Voice Acting
The animation is probably the best part about this movie, and it's not even that good! I mean, it's certainly better than worse animated movies like "Norm of the North" or "Foodfight!", but it's still somewhat average. The design of "Textopolis" looks very plain, but it does have quite a few models. I don't know, the animators might have been trying, but they didn't have much material to work with. The rest of the settings look mostly plain, but a couple of them look fine. I'm still not giving this movie extra credit, because I'd only do it if the animation was ABOVE average. The character designs suck in this movie. All the characters are emojis that just have stringy arms and legs, it's just lazy, but once again, the animators probably had almost nothing to work with. It's just pretty lazy. The voice acting in this movie wasn't terrible, but it really wasn't great at all. Also why is Sir Patrick Stewart a freaking poop emoji?! What?! You know, I watched an interview about his work on this movie, and he was probably in on this as a joke. He was really selling his role, and it was a little funny that he was acting like he took it seriously. As for everyone else, it's not that great.
Extra Thoughts:
Ok, so the big thing about this movie was that this movie was a rip off of 3 critically acclaimed (and actually great) animated films, "Wreck It Ralph", "The Lego Movie", and "Inside Out". I honestly didn't think it was much a rip off of "Wreck it Ralph", because in that movie, our protagonist Ralph wants to become something he was never meant to be, while in this, Gene wants to become the thing he has to be so he isn't killed. Well it does change near the end when he realizes he wants to "Express Himself", that's where it becomes a rip off. As for "Inside Out", the concept of "meet the voices inside your head" sounds similar to "meet the emojis in your phones", that's pretty much the major similarity. As for "The Lego Movie", Jailbreak is way to similar to the character "WyldStyle". Like seriously, LOOK AT BOTH THEIR CHARACTER DESIGNS! I also would like to note how much product placement is in this movie. We literally watch our characters play "Candy Crush" for five god damn minutes! And they visit every app and make it clear which one it is. They also play "Just Dance" for a fairly long time, probably to pat out this movies less than 90 minute run-time. We also watch Gene's parents watch "Pen Pineapple Apple Pen" which is a meme that died out LAST YEAR! This is why you don't put memes in movies. One more thing I want to say is that watching this "film" with my mom and brother, I had such absolutely LOW expectations for this movie that I didn't feel so angry watching it. It was pretty much impossible for me to be even more disappointed than I was initially, because I had zero expectations for it. Basically, I knew how bad it was going to be that, I didn't feel much to it initially.
Rating: 1/10 (Cinematic Garbage)
Final thoughts/Summary:
"The Emoji Movie" is a failure on nearly every level of animation. While it isn't as bad as bigger animated failures such as "Foodfight!" or "Norm of the North", it is still ABYSMAL! If you are planning on watching this movie for ironic pleasure like I did, it's not even a so-bad-it's-funny movie such as "The Room". I really cannot reccomend this terrible, pandering, unfunny trash to ANYBODY!
I hope you enjoyed my first review, I'm already planning on making more reviews soon, see ya!
Comments
Good review. While I do feel that beating The Emoji Movie to the ground is pretty much a dead horse at this point and we should just move on to much better movies than it, I got to say your first review went pretty well. Wait, didn't you do some other reviews prior to this? - visitor
Thank you. I know the emoji movie didn't come out that recently, but I just wanted to talk about it by seeing the movie first. And yes, I have reviewed more movies before (The Dark Tower, The Founder, La La Land) they can be found on my profile or on their respective lists - Phillip873
Let’s not forget the fact that the robot was not able to get into Dropbox, yet it manages to get in later on. - DCfnaf
Yeah, this movie has an incredible amount of plot holes! So much you can't even focus much on the movie! - Phillip873
This movie actually grew onme
and no I'm being 100% serious - ProPanda
What does that mean? - Phillip873
It got better - ProPanda
I honestly have no words...
So I’ll just type emojis in response.
🤣😂🤣😂🤣☠️🤢🤢🤢👿👹👺😈💩👺☠️☠️💀 - DCfnaf
What? How? - Phillip873
Kids don't do things ironically... those feelings might no be ironic after some point. - ProPanda
This movie scarred emojis like Titans scarred Eren Yeager
"For years we lived in the wall in fear of The Emoji Movie" - TwilightKitsune
10/10 movie lol
100% no kidding - visitor
Relevant username - Phillip873
Lol - visitor