Atlantis: The Lost Empire

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Atlantis: The Lost Empire is a visually beautiful film… and that’s pretty much all that’s truly great about it. It has a passable plot, with some interesting elements but most of the characters are forgettable and there isn’t really enough character development to make it interesting overall.

In the film young adventurer named Milo Thatch goes to discover Atlantis with a group of explorers – much of the story is cliched, with the ‘surprise’ villain being very easy to spot and essentially being the typical greedy guy who only cares about becoming rich at the cost of the environment around him. Other than becoming a bit more confident in himself, Milo doesn’t really have much of a story arc, or any character development for that matter– he ends the story the same person he started it as, which isn’t very interesting considering he’s supposed to be the protagonist.

The side characters who make up the rest of the crew going to Atlantis at least have a bit of development, but they’re only mildly interesting as characters and much of the humour involving them falls flat.

Luckily the film does look really good, with animation that could easily slot in with the films of the Renaissance – in particular, the scenes where the characters are underwater look fantastic. Additionally, the way in which the film constructs the culture of Atlantis in such detail is great and the story of the culture of Atlantis dying is the most interesting part of the film, although it is dropped a bit towards the end which is a shame.

Atlantis has some good potential for a great movie, but the lack of development of its greater aspects unfortunately causes it to sink in the end.

Ratings

Good guys: The flat characters are one of the film’s biggest weaknesses, so they gets 4/10

Bad guys: The villain is very generic, so he only gets 3/10

Animation: There’s some really great animation here, so that gets 8/10

Music: It has a nice score, so the music gets 6/10

Plot: In spite of some interesting story threads, the plot is pretty thin overall so it gets 5/10

Overall score: 26/50

Next review: Lilo and Stitch