I Found the Movie to Be · 7:39pm Oct 6th, 2017
A good example of a Meghan McCarthy multi-part episode:
With all the pluses and minuses that entails. But I'll put the rest "under the cut" in case I start getting too spoilery.
Maybe I'm seeing more of myself in her than is actually the case, but I've always gotten the feeling that McCarthy works better when she's got a story editor than when she's editing her own stuff. Being the last link on the scripting chain seems to make her stop one draft short of where I'd like her to stop.
It's completely understandable, of course, especially at the break-neck pace of modern TV animation. But in the movie here, there were several times where another line or two--and in one case, quite literally one additional word--would've tied a scene much more tightly into the whole storyline or added a dimension that was otherwise lacking.
That being said, I enjoyed the movie quite a lot despite these moments of, "Oh, if only Twilight had said this" or "Oh, if only the Storm King had said that." I arrived at the theater half an hour early 'cause I always get everywhere early, and found the entire auditorium completely empty. So I took a seat in the middle about halfway back, fished out my pocket notebook and started working on a sonnet--'cause, I mean, what else am I gonna be doing?
Maybe ten minutes later, a young couple comes in. They look around the empty theater, then march over and sit down directly beside me. Curse my animal magnetism! They have their phones out, of course, and at one point, the young woman says that the other people in her chat room are in a theater with over a hundred people waiting for the movie to start. I don't wonder out loud if ours is the outlying experience or if theirs is because I rarely if ever say anything out loud, but I do pose the question internally to myself.
By 10PM, another three or four people had trickled in, and that was when the previews started. These went on for ages and ages--fifteen or twenty minutes at least!--before the actual movie took to the screen and went on till midnight. I couldn't remember the last time I'd been out wandering around after midnight. but I resisted the urge to perform an impromptu dance number in the empty mall, found my car, and headed home.
If I can manage it, I'd like to get out and see the movie again. I found the massive, limpid pools of the redesigned characters' eyes to be a bit distracting and might've missed a few bits of dialogue while struggling not to drown: maybe I should sit a row or three further back next time. Fluttershy has one good line throughout the course of the film, and Applejack has two, maybe three. Spike is quite solid in support but doesn't do any real snarking; Rarity is mostly there for comedy relief but is unimpeachably perfect in that role; and Dash gets to initiate a musical number this is quite literally rabble-rousing.
Twilight is, of course, the heroine, and Pinkie, somewhat surprisingly, proves to be her main foil among the protagonists: their scene together at the low point before the act three climax spells out the theme of the movie much more successfully than Tempest's villain song in Act Four, a song that makes less and less sense the more I think about it.
The prequel comics are helpful and nicely done. I'd recommend them for folks who might be interested in the new settings and characters.
Mike
Yeah, the eyes freaked me out a bit too. Just got back (literally) from watching this with my son. Who is 29. I really need to make a review. I can understand why they didn't use Starlight Glimmer, Discord, or Flurry Heart (complexity of a movie = the cube of the number of actors) but those right up in the face shots with the eyes... No.
Tempest OP, plz nerf. I mean, they never actually defeated her.
"Oh woe is me, my horn broke when I was young..."
"So you can't use magic?"
"No, I can still use magic. It's just dark and edgy magic now so all the other foals were scared and ran away."
She's like someone's min-maxed GURPS character.
And the song was a bit... I didn't get it. Did she expect Twilight to join her *after* getting her magic drained? I guess that's how the Storm King recruited most of his lackeys.
None of those were what I disliked about the movie, though -- overall I liked it a lot! But the sudden about-face from the parrots seemed weird (what did they think was going to happen?) , and having all her friends suddenly abandon her because they were mad (would have made more sense for them to yell at her until she ran away or something).
I left largely disappointed.
If I could narrow it to just a few things, it would probably be the movie's reliance on Twilight basically never using magic (and I think only once effectively, during the escape), such that I couldn't get invested in the plot since as written it felt too contrived; far too high an annoying-comic-relief quotient, with Pinkie in S4-mode for over half the movie, the little troll guy, the Storm King himself, and Princess Sky Star; and the fact that during Twilight's outburst (and her ending up mostly alone as all the other ponies left her) she was substantively right for everything that happened up to the very moment she made her request to Pinkie--and making that request was indicating that she trusted Pinkie, not the reverse!
The new animation style was mostly good (muzzles looked off from some angles and they tried too hard with Twilight's expressions on multiple occasions, but otherwise solid), and there were good songs from the cat, Pinkie, and especially Rainbow Dash.
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I definitely think:
Celestia needs to invest heavily in the Equestrian pre-school system. 'Cause judging by both Starlight and Tempest, traumatizing a pony as a child is almost guaranteed to get you a monster of some sort. It'd be an outgrowth of the Cutie Mark Crusaders camp system and be like horizon's Versebreakers: young ponies trained to leap in and turn other young ponies away from madness and villainy by the sheer power of friendship.
Feel free if anyone wants to write that...
Mike
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Or Luna could do it by creating tantibus-like creatures to keep them company in their dreams. If necessary, she could help them escape into the real world to be the foals' imaginary friends.
But what would you do with them once the kids outgrew them? I guess you'd need some sort of retirement home.
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Oddly enough I really liked the eyes. Maybe they hypnotized me! But I was glad to see 2D (mostly) animation again on the big screen after so many years of almost nothing but 3D cg. At least for Western animation.
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OK:
Now I've got that kazoo-laden theme song running through my head...
Mike
I saw it at 9 PM, and there was literally just one couple in the theater besides my friend and I. I hope our banter didn't upset them. :B
This, really hard.
This is a perfect summary of everything wrong with the film (Plus add a dash of 'Hollywood meddling' that I imagine went on here).
McCarthy scripts basically need a story editor who cares about consistency and characterization. Like I think the reason I am so down on the movie and others aren't is I loved the MLP of S1 & S2 which worked so hard in many ways to be consistent wherever possible. Maybe not in terms of the timeline, but in terms of characterization (Except Pinkie Pie, and Mare Do Well).