If you’ve been to the movies in the past year or so, you’ve maybe seen a trailer for the new “Artemis Fowl” movie. It’s based off of Eoin Colfer’s hit book series of the same name. However, you probably haven’t seen the actual movie. The theater release date was rescheduled twice, and then it was released on Disney+ on June 12, 2020. But I’m getting a little bit sidetracked here. The point is that they wasted $125 million on “Artemis Fowl,” a movie that got 8% on Rotten Tomatoes and severely disappointed me after 1 ½ years of waiting for it to come out. Let’s get into why it’s so bad.
The whole movie is presented to us as a story told by a guy in jail, whose name is Mulch Diggums (played by Josh Gad). It starts off okay. They introduce the main character, Artemis Fowl (Ferdia Shaw), and set up his relationships with his dad (Colin Farrell) and his bodyguard, Butler (Nonso Anozie). Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that Artemis Fowl is a twelve-year-old criminal mastermind. After this, it gets funky. Artemis’s dad is captured by an evil villain who isn’t supposed to show up until the second book in the original book series, and Artemis learns about a race of fairies that lives underground with a bunch of super advanced technology. He and Butler successfully capture a fairy, whose name is Holly Short (Lara McDonnell), but an enormous fairy military unit comes to recapture her. Then there’s an enormous battle between the fairies and the Fowls. At this point, the special effects really start to kick in. Some notable special effects moments are when a guy in a boat gets frozen in time, when Butler shoots a fairy crossbow, and when Artemis, Butler, and Holly get stuck in some kind of time-rift thingy. There are also a bunch of scenes with time-lapses, mostly with fairies moving unnaturally fast for no reason. At the end, Artemis Fowl uses a weird fairy magic device to get his dad back, breaks Mulch Diggums (who’s actually a fairy) out of jail, and flies off in a helicopter to stop his dad’s kidnapper. So, after 115 minutes, a fortune’s worth of SFX, an unnecessary scene involving a chandelier and a monster the size of a large grizzly bear, too many Irish accents, and several disjointed shots of Josh Gad eating dirt and ripping apart a staircase for absolutely no reason, you’re left thinking… whaaaaaa?
I still haven’t satisfactorily explained why the movie is so horrible. The movie is nothing like the book. It’s like the people who made the movie were going to make it exactly like the book, but halfway through the filming, they decided that that was too hard and made up their own plot. Also, it seems like whenever the movie producers couldn’t think of a way to keep the movie going, they would just put in some useless special effects sequence (such as digitally enhancing Josh Gad’s jaw). The main character learns nothing throughout the movie, despite a meaningful conversation with his psychiatrist in which Artemis rants about how fake the psychiatrist’s chair is. Then there’s a paradox involving the possible sequel to this lump of cinematic dung. The ending is really setting the movie up for a sequel, but if there was a sequel, the ending of the first movie would make it impossible to start the second one. Long story short, if they make a sequel, don’t watch it. Also, don’t watch the first movie either.
But you can read the book series. It is really good.