Animal Farm

0.1 - Absolutely zero part of me expected to have TWO 0.1/10 movies this year. But this is about to make me bump Iron Lung up.

This is a disgraceful adaptation of its source material.

First, it’s just not a story that needs a kids adaptation. I know talking animals feels inherently kid targeted but cutting the darkness, & adding excessive juvenile humor (and Seth Rogen chortles), changes the core messaging.

Maybe not as much as the entire third act, full of a heist storyline culminating in hoof-to-hoof combat and a happy ending, does however. Every adaptation of this book does a little to change the ending to either soften it, or to better reflect political leanings of the time it was produced. But this was maybe the most egregious. It ends on a truly hopeful note with a message that essentially said everything that happened was one bad actor, & that a new revolution will work better this time. That’s the antithesis of Orwell’s message. Orwell’s whole point was history repeats, revolutions set up for the same problems in different skins, & systems don’t change easily. The other adaptations could at least be somewhat spun into a version of the idea that the systems in place are broken, but I didn’t get that vibe here at all.

But honestly, all that made for a bad but not horrendous movie going experience. That extra level came during the credits, where the studio decided to make one more gross joke at the expense of the messaging of the book & the audiences intelligence. They put up two QR codes - one for if you liked the movie & one for if you didn’t. And the one for if you didn’t is an overly long jokey propaganda inspired page where you’re told over & over you’re an idiot for not liking the movie, & then encouraged to pay it forward & buy seats for others to see the movie as a way to wipe your own slate clean. It left the absolute worst taste in my mouth.

I was aware of the studio doing this for other propaganda movies I didn’t see, like Sound of Freedom, & I know that it did nothing but deceptively over inflate their box office numbers since there was no clear way to have those tickets claimed, & theaters were just showing blocked seats on purchase screens, which then had no people actually sit in them. But the grossness of that practice & that people were dumb enough to do it that way if they wanted to have someone see it (instead of just actually buying someone a ticket or accompanying them to a show) aside, to actively insult the intelligence of the few people who actually do go see this in person makes the whole practice worse in my mind. I already felt bad enough I used an AMC A-List pass use on this & sat through it (it was purely curiosity at how bad it could actually be, I promise).

If you want to see the page for yourself, I’ll put the site in the comments.

The final nail though was how many actors, writers, & producers that I have some level of respect for were involved. Andy Serkis, Seth Rogen, Gaten Matarazzo, Glen Close, Kieran Culkin, Laverne Cox, Woody Harrelson, Iman Vellani, Jim Parsons, Nicholas Stoller - these are all names that I would expect are above some level of selling out this bad. I’m not sure why I felt that for most of them, other than just pure name recognition, but I can’t help but be disappointed with some of the names on that list. This list is why it ultimately falls all the way to a 0.1/10 instead of being somewhere probably in the 2s.

Please don’t repeat my mistake.

This film was marketed as a children’s movie, but this is far from that. This whole film has very dark themes and elements that make this film very adult. The story itself is lacking in a lot of departments, and unfortunately, it’s a rather lack luster film with some big names.

This is the weakest adaptation of the book I ever saw. This is the kiddie version of “Animal Farm”. Seriously, go watch the 1954 version and don’t care if it’s CIA-produced, it’s the better version by far.

I’m not giving this a watch.

Meh

Wtf