Space Chimps 2

With the original Space Chimps largely forgotten it seemed to hardly be crying out for a sequel, yet what was even more surprising was that arriving at an empty cinema I realised this new film already had been forgotten. So with an entire cinema to myself I set about watching Zartog Strikes Back wondering how bad a movie could possibly be to deserve this attendance on opening day. I soon found out.

During the original Space Chimps the simian astronauts saved an alien planet from its tyrannical ruler Zartog, who, frozen in a statue, decided to return to Earth so he could star in the sequel. However, that said Zartog is throughout the film about as threatening as a small rabbit holding a sign with the word ‘boo’ written on it. As he moves around attempting to conquer Earth his pure idiocy becomes increasingly apparent whilst he explains all his moronic actions through talking to himself. Yet despite this Zartog succeeds in only being incompetent, and is actually far less annoying than those around him. The other characters are entirely two dimensional and whereas in Pixar and DreamWorks animations we are made to sympathise and feel for them, arguably the greatest strength of those films, here the characters seem to exist only to annoy. Furthermore despite uttering a few lines of banal dialogue, most of the time they don’t seem to care at all about the situations they encounter, for example when a friend is in trouble they will quite happily start making jokes about it, or start live blogging when in danger. Most of the blame can only be placed in the hands of the screenwriters whose dialogue varies from awful to horrifically irritating. Their attempts at humour and wit fall completely flat and descend mainly into atrocious puns about the fact that they are monkeys.

What’s more is that the film’s low budget is incredibly obvious, and its animation when compared to that of its competitors is simply shocking. Although the central characters may appear at first glance to be well animated, many of their more complex movements look terrible and most of their facial expressions barely change. The backgrounds are even worse, being primarily blank with little or no extra details, and any scenery they do have looks awful for the most part. Notably, the grass in the film often looks like a badly made green carpet and the animation for creatures such as the dog is terrible – when running he doesn’t quite touch the ground. The 3D effect is simply painful, frequently just shoving characters and items towards the viewer in quick succession and making the viewer’s eyes sore.

Overall, Space Chimps 2 seems unfit for cinematic release considering the subpar quality. However, it has the enormous positive that at only 76 minutes long the ordeal is over relatively quickly even if it may not feel that way.

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