A movie about the little pictures featured in your phone.
I think we all were not expecting much when the first trailer hit the internet late last year. In fact, a majority of us were in complete shock. Surely they were not going to make a movie about Emojis of all things. How were they going to make a movie out of Emojis?
Well they did make a movie out of these Emojis and sure enough, it turns out to be just as bad as we imagined. The Emoji movie hit theaters last week and as I am typing this article, it has a truly putrid score of 8% of Rotten Tomatoes.
That's pretty darn bad.
Though there is no doubt that the Emoji Movie was going to flop in theaters, the question to ask now is why were we expecting it to fail. Since the first viewing of the film's trailer, people have been screeching on the internet about the abomination this movie would become.
Why is the Emoji Movie so terribly flawed from the very start?
In my opinion, it's because of how dated the movie is going to be in the future.
Sure, the movie is riddled with tons of other problems festering in the flesh of this film. The flimsy and tired plot mixed with confusing messages, awful character development, and flat jokes can attest to the movie's awful score. However the main problem for me is when a movie or a show tries to become hip and popular with the cool kids. They try to make references to things in society that are popular today.
For example, the Emoji Movie makes references to "#blessed," "Bye Felicia," "Pen Pineapple Apple Pen" and many more things that are so-called trending today. For me, that dates a movie terribly and makes watching the film enjoyable from the get go. It's sort of like watching your weird relative who tries to be cool trying to dab; it just doesn't feel good. The movie is awful with this mainly because it centers around something that will be so dated in the future: Emojis themselves.
There are two main things, in my opinion, that referencing "current trends" will disrupt. When people go see a movie, they are often trying to be told a story. They want to be able to escape into a fictional world and be truly invested in the lives of the characters on the screen. By throwing references in our faces, we are not able to fully immerse ourselves into the movie and into the struggles of the main characters.
Another thing is the timeless feel to a movie or a show. You don't want all of these references to current society to run the entire movie because then your film will be incredibly dated and years later will not be taken as seriously. If you movie has a timeless feel to it, your audience will grow and be timeless as well. I'm not saying a movie can never have any references to the current world, I just think letting those references control the plot and the humor runs the risk of your movie becoming forgotten in the future.
In the end, we were not expecting much from the Emoji Movie in the beginning. In my opinion, there is nothing of value to be taken away from seeing the movie as well.
