Thread by @OSPyoutube

Desperately curious about the Artemis Fowl movie now 👀 -R

sooooooo should I do it -R

roger that, team leader

bold move leading with "artemis fowl is a SUPER CRIMINAL" when we all know that's the one thing they didn't put in the movie

the people who decided nobody would wanna watch a twelve-year-old supervillain should've watched the response to umbrella academy

is josh gad gonna be narrating in this voice for the WHOLE movie

this movie delights in opening a scene with something that looks like it's from the books ("artemis is a supercriminal", the psychiatrist scene) and then psyching us out by removing all of Artemis's sass and bite from it

disney we gotta talk about your crippling addiction to murdering moms

actually I'm REALLY mad about the dead mom angle, because returning her sanity was the key to Artemis's character development and the first sign he wasn't entirely cold-hearted and calculating, and making him a Nice Misunderstood Boy removes the need for that, so they iced her

listen I don't remember the later books that well, but wasn't Artemis's thing with the fairies his own thing? Like, his own "crazy theory" and long-shot to cure his mom no matter the cost? Didn't his dad have zero connection with them?

oh wait that opening montage about Oh No He's A Criminal was really about artemis SENIOR, wasn't it? sneaky sneaky

"artemis was totally alone except for his dad. and also his loyal butler, Butler. we forgot about him."

guess what, character designers? you can actually have black characters without making them blond and/or blue-eyed. I know, shocking! But it's totally allowed!

new trope, Chekov's Beverage. If a character is introduced drinking from a glass vessel at the beginning of a scene, they will receive shocking news, drop the glass in slow motion, and shatter it across the floor.

shadowy hooded villains with voice modulators need to invest in less silly-sounding voice modulators. this bad guy sounds like Kitty Yzma from the end of Emperor's New Groove

listen I generally try to avoid sassing child actors but this is really a case where the vocal delivery is very dubious and unconvincing

josh gad's narration voice sounds like my Unicron impression and that's not a compliment to either of us

Hey, casting directors! Holly Short is repeatedly described as having a crew cut, nut-brown skin and a coffee complexion! This girl looks Very White with an Adorable Pixie Cut! I know, easy mistake to make!! Maybe do better next time though!!!

okay the bad guy is Opal, right? I don't recall other major female villains

So that major character arc about Holly being the first female LEP officer and Root being a hardass and working her twice as hard so she could prove herself to the others is now completely nullified with LEP being equal opportunity and Root being Dame Judi Dench

Holly: "Commander! I have a new lead on my father!"
R:

So let me get this straight, we take away Holly's entire character arc about having to prove herself in a male-dominated field, and instead make her character arc revolve around male character who, to my knowledge, is never even mentioned in the books

This feels like a really good demonstration of how corporate-approved performative wokeness takes away from actual progressive narratives but I'm a little too distracted to formulate that essay right now

"Artemis was totally alone except for his dad. And his butler, Butler. And his butler's twelve-year-old niece, Juliet Butler."

This movie casts black actors for Butler (Russian) and Foley (centaur), but casts a white actor for Holly ("coffee complexion"). Dare I wonder if they were fine adding representation for minor secondary characters but shied away from canon rep in a lead role?

literally what the hell is an Aculos

From what I recall, and I admit it's been a while since I read these books, Holly was a hardass professional LEP soldier and part of the humor was the dissonance between her spritelike appearance and her hardened vet attitude. Why is she a rookie who's never flown before?

One of my favorite parts of the books was that Holly has this attitude of a no-nonsense grizzled loose cannon cop. I'm really not liking this eager rookie who flies off in the middle of a mission "to clear my father's name!!!"

okay an aculos is a powerup macguffin. neat it took half an hour to tell us even that much

ding ding ding! "name: opal koboi"

judi dench's unicron impression also leaves something to be desired

"Get the four leafed clover out of here!"

The dialogue pacing gets really weird in some of these scenes. It's rapid-fire, no pauses, barely any room for actual vocal delivery. It gets much worse when there's more than one child actor in the scene.

Also they've stuck Holly in this big ramshackle cage with a sliding wooden panel they open and shut dramatically, but the problem is the rest of the cage is an open wire frame. The "slamming the window shut" drama is completely lost when you can still see the person behind it.

In about half the scenes, Butler knows everything about fairies because he's been in this game for decades along with Artemis Senior and Artemis Junior's new to this. In the other half, Artemis is expositing about fairies to Butler, who seems surprised at the new information.

"Top o' the mornin'."

Artemis needs his power suit for this one. For… reasons.

remember how cool it was when artemis cheated the time freeze in the books? guess how they did it in the movie

no guys, artemis has a power suit like a Negotiation Power Suit, not like iron man

Root: ah shit holly's in Fowl Manor, this is bad because we know about the Fowls
Root: hello small child in fowl manor who kidnapped my officer, who are you
Artemis Fowl: Artemis Fowl
Root: ahhhhh, a Fowl, this explains everything and is definitely new surprising information

Forgot to mention that opal's evil plan is because humans don't take fairies seriously and think they're small and cute

watching Dame Judi Dench acting opposite this child actor is Rough

good sign when the narration has to explain that artemis's plan is brilliant and genius because it isn't actually self-demonstrating its brilliance and genius

Artemis: My father was kidnapped.
Holly: My father is dead!!
*beat*
Artemis: Can I trust you?
Holly: You have no choice.
Artemis: *removes sunglasses* How did he die?

I got actual whiplash from that transition. They went from yelling to bonding in literally one line that had no continuity with the line before it.

Oh so now the aculos is a portal generator between worlds, nice to learn fifty minutes into the story

Diggums… wants to be small…… because he's tall for a dwarf……… they really didn't want to let any of these characters just be criminals did they

"Listen to the two of us… grunting at each other like a pair of hippos with a throat infection…" Josh Gad's improv line about the dumb voices he and Judi Dench had to do made it into the final cut?

my nightmares have a new face

Mulch was tunneling in from underground, why did he come through an upper story wall

ugh just seeing artemis politely asking if he can trust holly feels SO WRONG

so the aculos was in artemis's safe the whole time, and he needed mulch and his treasure-sniffing powers to find it in his home. That's at least halfway clever, but the premise of "Artemis can't find the macguffin in his own house" makes it all the way stupid

"Don't. The aculos will kill you if you use it - if any human does." Man this thing has different rules and powers every time you mention it, almost like it's the platonic ideal of a bullshit macguffin

Troll fight incoming

First genuinely funny scene! Holly says "I'll need my gun", Butler goes to retrieve it and looks confused, Mulch silently pulls it out of his pocket and hands it to her. Chronic pickpockets are one of my favorite comedy troped

Holly… flew into the chandelier the minute the troll arrived… got stuck… and is now screaming for help

minute 3 of the fight, holly is still stuck in the chandelier screaming for help

hmmm, so butler is squished under the falling troll instead of getting his ass heroically kicked in the process of fighting him and then healed by holly

omg if they actually kill butler

oh good news, against all odds he managed to survive being a black guy in an action movie

guess that explains why they didn't mess up his suit or make him look visibly injured in any way

this collapsing timefreeze is such an unnecessary action setpiece

we're back in the no-pauses-dialogue-zone

"My dad used to say, a friend's eye is a good mirror."
Me, remembering what happens with Artemis and Holly's eyes in the later books:

hey why did the fairies bounce when they know artemis still has the aculos, their ultimate sacred treasure of cosmic power

holly used the aculos, it had no visible effect and now artemis senior is magically safe and fine

look if you're gonna make the movie an action movie with a supervillain antagonist, the LEAST you could do is let the good guys actually CONFRONT the supervillain in the finale

wow, what a heartwarming and satisfying conclusion that wraps up all the loose ends

so… hey, the framing sequence where mulch is spilling this entire story to MI6 - where the FUCK does that fit into this?!

"Just who do you think you are?"
"I'm Artemis Fowl… and I'm a criminal mastermind."

even with the explanation of the framing sequence and the ham-fisted exposition of how it was Artemis's plan all along, I STILL don't understand what just happened

So they say Eoin Colfer was supposedly involved in the production of this movie. Did they just have her tied up in a closet somewhere?

OH eoin's a guy my bad

so did they have HIM tied up in a closet somewhere or what

cut me some slack, I read the books in middle school and haven't thought about them since :c