Bad movies aren’t uncommon. I think people seem to forget that. I’d name a few, but there’s really no point because we generally brush them away. I watch a few movies just so that I can appreciate good or average movies average (“Dirty Grandpa” feels like “The Hangover” if you watch it after “Zoolander 2”.)
But bad movies in the past were bad because of lazy writing ("Paper Towns"), or forced sequels ("Lion King 2"), or extremely generic remakes of other movies (too many to list.) Some had to work with a small budget, which is forgivable. Some movies are actually good, but don’t get promoted well. Some movies aren’t being ambitious, but just want some cool actions scenes with some mindless story.
But the "Emoji Movie" is different. It had the budget it needed. It had the promotion it needed. Judging from the movie, it was trying to be thoughtful/clever.
But it wasn’t.
At all.
It’s no wonder people call this movie a bad knock-off of “Inside Out.”
I could go on about a lot of things in this movie like other reviewers have. But I won’t. This movie upsets me not because it’s a bad movie, but because I think it’s a new milestone in bad movies. I think it marks a period where the content is secondary and movie-making is an industry like any other. The movie makers did not really need to entertain as much as they needed to make sure people would buy the tickets, and only a month in, the movie already started making millions.
I used to think the blizzard of "grounded" reboots was a problem because they capitalized off nostalgia. A reboot is announced and suddenly we go back to idealized memories from 10 years ago and pledge to watch the reboot.
The industry knows this, and ever since the Marvel Cinematic Universe launched, that concept has been making billions from the Superhero movies to the "Power Rangers" reboot to the new "Blade Runner."
(I wonder if they’ll make a dark reboot of the "Teletubbies". Now THAT would be interesting. Imagine the stuffed animals running away from the sun as it keeps fading through black with intense action music.)
With the "Emoji Movie," we've finally hit a point where people will watch anything as long as it has something we're vaguely familiar with.
We know the plotlines for most movies already through the trailers, but still watch them anyway. Most of us already knew the plot for the comic book movies because we read the comics. We essentially don’t really care about watching something new and inventive as much as we want to get the entertainment. We already know what these movies give us, so we watch them with a sort of assurance.
But like this was just capitalizing
The "Emoji Movie" is the McDonalds of movies. You don’t go there willingly. You go there because you decided, “why not?” or your younger companion dragged you there. They frolic around, laughing, in a brightly-colored play place while you can’t look past the fact that you may not get out of it alive. There’s filth everywhere and you’re slowly dying just by sitting there and eating up some thoughtless and cancerous product (stuffed between two slices of bread) which is slowly killing you and the others around you. Not to mention the obvious: they’re both created by clowns.
