‘Bee Movie’ left me with a distinct
feeling of sadness mixed with apathy. It doesn’t help that I’ve
been watching a backlog of unwatched Dreamworks films over the last
couple of weeks and the ones I hadn’t watched before were the ones
with mixed reputations. The leftovers were at best harmlessly
mediocre and at worst near unwatchable. Dreamworks have a handful of
genuine classic films, ones that can go toe-to-toe with anything
Pixar have made. Aside from those few however, the rest are really
disappointing.
‘Bee Movie’ just exists, that’s
all it does. This was the only thought that kept running through my
mind while watching. To explain the plot you basically take Woody
Allen’s character Z from ‘Antz’ and have him fall in love with
a human, then completely abandon that plot for a courtroom drama.
Then you completely abandon that plot for ‘Airplane’ based
disaster film slapstick. It’s interesting to see a three act film
that has three completely different genres and stories played out in
each.
I can only assume that this film
originally had three separate drafts that were combined because I
can’t imagine this being the original format, unless it was
sneakily adapted from an extensive trilogy of terrible books. Since
this film has three pretty much separate stories I’m going to
comment on them separately.
Act 1 ‘Antz with bees or: How I
learnt to stop worrying about original ideas from Dreamworks’.
I suspect the first 20 minutes of this
film could be played alongside the first 20 minutes of Ants and
they’d line up perfectly. Barry B Benson is a bee who doesn’t
want to be a bee, who doesn’t understand why the colony works the
way it does. He has a friend who is happy with the status quo. Bees
also have a pecking order, some are more important than others. This
part of the film is ‘Antz’, but ‘Antz’ without the clever
script or design work and with about a million bee puns. “I’m
going to get an ant tattoo” says the dissenting Barry, he might as
well. As Barry leaves the safety of the hive and goes out into the
dangerous world, he is saved by a human and that brings us to.
Act 2 ‘Mr Benson goes to
Washington’
So Barry finds himself befriending a
human, one he is sexually attracted to for some reason. He is
horrified to discover that humans collect honey from bees. Upon
discovering a bee farm, which is worryingly reminiscent of a
concentration camp, Barry decides to declare a class action suit
against humanity for stealing honey. Now I’d given up fighting by
this point so I was fully willing to accept that a talking bee was
fighting in a court case, that being said it is every bit as stupid
as you would think. In addition to the absent minded holocaust
imagery the film also makes, numerous, references to slavery. The
film goes as far as to have the lawyer fighting Barry talk with a
southern drawl. Barry shouts to him that bees shouldn’t be slaving
over honey for the “White man”, I’M NOT EVEN KIDDING!
Unfortunately Dreamworks don’t seem to realise that if you’re
going to use real world situations for an allegory that it comes with
consequences. Upon winning the case bees stop working and every plant
in the world starts to die. I guess the lesson is we should bring
back slavery or the world will end?
The court section of this film is by
far the strongest however. Barry has motivation and this part could
have been a film by itself. I like the fact that Dreamworks
un-ironically created a film about infringing on others intellectual
properties, while also stealing their own ideas in the process.
Act 3 ‘Surely you can’t bee
serious? I am serious and don’t call me Shirley!’
So for some reason Barry and his lady
friend Vanessa decide to take some of the few surviving cut plants in
the world to the bees for them to pollinate and thus save the rest of
the plants from death. During this we end up with them having to land
a plane, I would explain how this situation happened but I’d be
making more effort than the script did. Having successfully landed
the plane with the help of enough bees to lift a passenger jet, yet
again I’m serious; the forager bees take the pollen and set out to
save the plants of the world. Now I hate to be the one explaining
this but pollen is how plants reproduce. Sprinkling it over dying
plants will not, Evanescently, bring them back to life. Last time I
checked running around a hospital furiously masturbating over
terminally ill patients does nothing but get you a criminal record.
In addition to this, plant pollen is
not universal. In 99% of cases each plant needs pollen from the same
species to reproduce. Also and this is the biggie, bee’s aren’t
the only creatures to pollinate flowers; so them giving up wouldn’t
kill all plants overnight. This film has a male mosquito obsessed
with sucking blood, which male mosquitos can’t even do. They
instead eat sugar from plants, pollinating them in the process. Even
if all pollination from animals were stopped, humans have been hand
pollinating plants for centuries, why would they not do this in an
emergency?
The voice acting of this film is good,
with particularly strong performances from Matthew Broderick as Adam,
Barry’s friend and Patrick Warburton in full on Joe Swanson mode.
Weirdly Chris Rock is in this film but, given his Madagascar role of
Marty, he is trying to do a voice about as far from his own as
possible.
The celebrity cameos are dealt with about as badly as
Dreamworks have ever managed. We meet Bee Larry King, who Barry is
very quick to compare to human Larry King, complete with the rather
odd description of “Very Jewish”. Thankfully the characters of
bee-Columbus, bee-Ghandi and Bee-Jesus are only name dropped and
don’t actually appear. Although we do get to see Winnie the Pooh
sniped with a tranquiliser dart, so that’s something I guess?
I get that this film is trying to give
a message on the importance of bees to humanity, which they are. I
fail to see how this script was decided as the best one to go with
however. This script is not good, committed actors can’t save a
script that simply doesn’t feel finished. We get the trademark
awkward cameos, puns and weird sexual references that would be
expected in any lazy Dreamworks film; thankfully we don’t get any
terrible songs, although I suspect we would if they weren’t all
hiding in the credits. This film isn’t good but unlike say, Shark
Tale, it does have good performances from the cast and lots of
interesting ideas. I suspect that this film would have worked a lot better with live action humans. This brand of constantly evolving narrative and comedy works when you have some element of normal everyday life to anchor it. Although 'Antz' managed it, so you might as well just watch ‘Antz’.
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