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“IT’S FEEDING TIME!”
This might well be the worst adaptation 
since Avatar The Last Airbender.
How was this possible?
One word:
Disney.
I make no secret of the fact that I loath
Disney as a company,
and now they’ve given me yet another
page to add to my burn book.
For quite some time now, they’ve been working
on an adaptation of Artemis Fowl,
the popular book series by - I- I’m not gonna
try to pronounce that -
about the titular 12-year-old criminal mastermind
and his entanglement with a world of fey creatures.
After being stuck in development hell for over
10 years - where it really should have stayed-
it was finally squirted onto their streaming
service Disney+ a few weeks ago,
like the diarrhoea from an expired kebab.
And to put it mildly, it’s a disgrace.
Where to even begin?
It’s awful in almost every respect, it’s one of the worst adaptations of a source material I’ve ever seen,
and it’s an utter insult to fans of the
books, myself include, who are rightfully
frothing at the mouth.
It’s a complete mess, and it feels more like a trailer
for a franchise to come than an actual movie.
Now I will admit that the cinematography 
and set design are pretty great.
Although they should be, since this
film cost $125 million dollars.
I know that’s pocket change for Disney,
but gosh“Darvit”, what a waste of money!
And there *are* little flashes of good
ideas and creativity on display
but they’re like kernels of corn
sticking out of a turd.
Because the movie is completely
ruined by its presentation.
It’s just… off.
It’s hard to describe or put my finger on,
but imagine that you have a bunch of stuff
arranged in a nice pattern on your desk,
and then some a-hole comes in
and moves everything just slightly?
Imagine that, but as a movie.
This can only be partly attributed to what
must have been a difficult post-production
and editing process,
because what the editors were trying to
re-arrange into something coherent
was pretty dreadful to start with.
The delivery is not engaging, at all.
And it renders the film utterly boring.
Even when the characters are fighting
a troll that’s tearing through a house.
How do you make *that* boring?
And so for a movie that’s only
90 minutes, it drags like hell.
I wasn’t surprised in the least to hear
that a lot of people couldn’t make it past
the first 20 minutes,
because 30 minutes in, only one
significant event has happened.
That’s a third of the f*cking runtime!
And much of that 30 minutes is taken up by
copious amounts of lazy exposition courtesy
of Hagrid’s annoying cousin,
with the movie using the device of a character
telling the story to an interrogator
to attempt to get away with eggregiously 
breaking the “Show, Don’t Tell” rule,
as the movie treats even its young
target audience like idiots.
This is only one of a myriad of problems with
the writing, which is by far the biggest issue.
I can only think of one example of a joke
that made me laugh because its writing and
execution were decent.
HOLLY: “I’ll need my gun!”
Every other attempt falls flat.
The dialogue tries to sound intelligent,
but it’s really not.
“It’s not perfect, Holly. But it’s ours, it's a 
light to guide us, but it’s worth fighting for.”
And it’s aggravatingly cliched at times.
“You believed in everything I told
you about the Hill of Tara!.”
“All I really want... is to believe in you.”
Uuuggghhh!!!
Character development - where it exists at all -
is more rushed than an EA development cycle.
And while I do think the actors *tried* to
work with that they were given,
not even Daniel Day Lewis could muster a 
good performance out of this material.
While we’re on the subject, I don’t think a 
single character in this movie was well cast.
Not one.
Take Judi Dench.
Apparently her casting as Commander Root was
a homage to her role as M, the head of MI6
in the Bond movies.
But aside from that, I don’t know
what she’s doing here.
Maybe she had a third mortgage that needed
paying off, or another grandkid who wanted a pony
but her performance - complete with an awful
Irish accent and a fifty-cigarettes-a-day
gravelly voice - is particularly
painful to watch.
Although she did make me laugh the hardest.
“TOP OF THE MORNIN'.”
*LAUGH* What?! WHAT?!
Definitely the worst, though,
is Ferdia Shaw as Artemis himself.
He neither looks nor acts convincingly like
a genius criminal mastermind,
and more like the kid who’d get his lunch money
stolen and his head flushed down the toilet.
They also managed to get themselves into a
bit of hot water with their casting choices.
In the books, Officer Holly Short is described as
having “dark nut-brown skin of a coffee complexion'
while here she’s more like skimmed milk,
attracting accusations of whitewashing.
And Artemis’s bodyguard Domovoi Butler is
described as Eurasian, able to pass as both
Japanese and Russian.
So they somehow managed to piss off 
*both* sides of that debate.
But as to the characters themselves, they’ve
also been butchered, with Artemis in particularly
being a complete joke.
The Artemis of the books is indeed a criminal
mastermind, a cool, calculating genius,
but also with a sympathetic side,
who goes from being an outright villain to
an antihero with a conscience over the course
of several books.
But here he’s just a generic smart kid who
gets thrust into a new world, like every other
kids adventure protagonist.
Director Kenneth Branagh
 - yes *that* Kenneth Branagh -
explained that he made this fundamental change
because he didn’t think that audiences would
accept a 12 year old villain.
Which is exactly why the books were so successful.
Because kids *couldn’t* accept a 12 year old villain!
I think maybe he never stopped method acting
after that mind wipe scene in Harry Potter.
It’s just mindboggling to me that they decided
to change what is arguably the most important
aspect of his character and the reason
for his appeal in the first place…
because they thought the audience
were f*cking stupid!
So instead we have this boring, puny, insecure
twerp who starts screaming at TV screens because
they insulted his dad.
And then they try to make him into a criminal in the end, but it’s poorly established and just ridiculous.
Like, you can’t not laugh at this sh*t!
As for the other characters, there’s Judi 
Dench’s Commander Root, who just looks tired...
Mulch Diggums has gone from being a loveable
rogue to being a diabetic Jack Sparrow knockoff.
And the scene where he tunnels into the
mansion is pure nightmare fuel.
Domavoi is now called Dom and absolutely hates
being called Butler, despite that being his
actual surname in the books.
Tech Officer Foaly is there, but is
and does very little.
And Judith Butler is also there, but does
basically nothing and may as well not have
been in it at all.
She also randomly and inexplicably comes in
and out of the movie like she’s shifting
through time and space itself.
But what about the story?
Well, the film is an adaptation of the first
book, with some elements of the second book
crudely mashed in.
What I don’t understand is why they didn’t
just straight-up adapt the first book,
which was a perfectly self-contained narrative that
could easily have been made into a 90-minute movie.
It was not “a tough nut to crack”!
You had something perfectly good right in
front of you, the hard work was already done!
So why make all these substantial changes
and force these two books together in a way
that results in both of them being gutted?
And while the author did say that he 
approved of the changes that were made,
and although in my opinion the word of the
original creator is paramount in this regard,
I-I can’t help but question why!
Some of the changes - like swapping the gender
of commander Root - are like, fine, whatever.
But others just seem pointless.
Like how the dwarf Mulch is now a giant dwarf,
and they never explain why he’s giant and
it adds nothing to the story.
And others were changes for the worse. 
Such as… everything else!
I won’t go through the plot in detail like
I usually do, but I will point out some of
the issues I had with it.
I can’t list them all because if I did,
we’d be here until we experience
the heat death of the universe.
And spoilers, so if you care
about those, go to here.
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Alright, back to this abomination.
First off, there’s the fact that the
events are narrated by Mulch,
who wasn’t present during some of them,
so how could he have know about them?
And not just events. He’s somehow able to
tell us about characters’ internal monologues
and motivations which he
would have no way of knowing.
Unless the others sat down and told him 
everything, which I’m calling bullsh*t on.
New subplots, like Holly Short’s father being
a traitor, are brought up abruptly and clumsily,
like an incel’s attempt at a chat-up line.
For some reason, they removed
Artemis’s mother from the story,
despite her playing an important role in affecting
his character and motivations in the book,
and allowing us to see a more sympathetic
side of this dastardly character.
Instead, the focus is on rescuing his dad,
who’s no longer a career criminal but instead
a good hearted thief who’s been stealing
from the Faeries for decades,
but somehow this boy genius
never caught on to that.
The villain who kidnaps him is a
hollow shell of an antagonist,
about whom we learn nothing except that she wants
to take the surface world back from the humans,
and she reminds me of the Bullyhunters mascot.
She wants Artemis to retrieve a
device called the Aculos.
They spend about 30 minutes repeatedly name-dropping
this magguffin before actually saying anything
about what it is,
by which time most people
would have turned off the movie.
Root says that with the Aculos gone,
the entire Faerie civilisation is in jeopardy,
although they don’t explain why,
and because the world building is so shallow
and the Fey world is barely explored, we don’t
get a sense of the stakes involved or care.
Rather than appealing to the Faeries for help,
Artemis decides to kidnap one - Holly Short -
to force them to hand over the Aculos,
which is like kidnapping a police officer
to force the government to give you a Nuke.
Which is obviously f*cking stupid!
So the Faeries bring an entire army to besiege
Fowl Manor to get Holly back, which seems
like massive overkill.
Then they deploy a Time Freeze, but as 
with all the other magic in this world,
it's not explained and acts inconsistently.
In an earlier scene in which Holly apprehends
a Troll, the Time Freeze deploys immediately
from a machine, with no effects beforehand,
but this time, Artemis observes some effects building
up on the seaside before the Faeries even arrive,
from which he deduces that the time freeze
is being deployed, which makes no sense.
Dom damages the time freeze, and
then when Root goes in to negotiate,
Artemis tells her that the time freeze will
only apply for another 27 more minutes,
but there’s no way he would possibly know that.
Also, Artemis keeps threatening that he’ll
expose the existence of the faeires to the world,
but based on what evidence?
And who’s going to believe him?
He tell Holly that he knows her name 
because he read it off her helmet.
In an earlier scene, he said that the
Fairy language is encoded,
but then it’s never explained how he’s
able to crack the code in order to read it.
And he goes from being the
smartass posteuring hostage taker,
to removing his sunglasses that block Holly’s
mind control powers in the span of 5 seconds,
because she told him that her father died.
What- What the f-?!
*Pain*
The Faeries can’t enter the house without 
permission because magic (again not explained)
so they get convicted thief Mulch to tunnel
his way into the house via literal anal evacuation.
While inside, Mulch very quickly finds a vault
hidden behind a portrait, opens it and finds
the Aculos...
Mulch says that this was part of Artemis’s plan,
but Artemis himself never elaborates on this,
and how could he have known that a dwarf 
would find and be able to open the vault?
And did he even know the vault was there in
the first place? How could this genius not have?
And the Aculos being in the house
the whole time is so dumb.
Why did his father not leave any hint
as to where the Aculos was,
or just outright say it in
the notes he left for him?
Why allow his son to risk provoking an all-out
war just to find it?! Oh my god…
And then for some inexplicable
reason, Artemis frees Holly.
Why? What does he need her for?
And why does he trust her to not use her mind
control powers on him when she’s done nothing
to earn that trust?
In the novel, Holly escapes on her own, and
it makes much more sense and it’s just much
better in general.
In fact, just- just assume that *everything*
is better in the books, and you’ll be safe.
And then Mulch starts working with them, and
suddenly they’re all buddy-buddies now.
The faeries unleash the troll that was captured
earlier into the house, so we have a mess
of an action scene.
In the book, Dom gets mortally wounded, but
with the help of Holly’s healing magic,
he comes back and takes the troll down, 
and it’s such a badass moment.
But here he gets hurt after pushing this little
dumbass out of the way of the falling troll.
His death scene is 3 minutes of drawn-out
melodrama, and since we don’t really know
much about him, it doesn’t have much impact.
And then Holly brings him back,
so it has even less.
The time freeze breaks down with multiple
cries of “it’s gonna blow!”, but then
why doesn’t it damage
anything inside of it?
The faeries get sucked up and thrown around,
but the house and it’s occupants are perfectly fine.
So what was the danger?
And why can’t they just deploy another time
freeze and repeat the process over again?
Are they seriously saying the faeries all just 
abandoned the Aculos, the most important
relic in their civilisation, and packed it in?!
What a load of bullsh*t.
And then Artemis and Holly declare that they
are “forever friends” despite hating each
other in the books and only working 
together out of necessity.
And she helps him use the Aculos to teleport
his father out of the villain’s clutches
and back to the manor,
a convenient way of wrapping up that 
storyline without even leaving the house.
It also turns out that Holly’s father stole
the Aculos and gave it to Artemis’ dad,
to stop it falling into the wrong hands?
How it would possibly be safer
here, oh my God…!
Commander Root says that they now know their
enemies - even though we still don’t -
and decides to investigate all the names on the list
of supposed traitors that Holly’s father drew up,
based on Holly’s word alone
and no other evidence.
Because she wouldn’t be
biased in that matter at all.
Mulch reveals that Artemis sent
him to get captured
because he thought the authorities would 
believe the story if it came from him,
which again is a huge and frankly 
ridiculous assumption.
And then Artemis is easily able to rescue
him from an MI6 top secret interrogation facility
via a helicopter
are you kidding me?!
And they all fly off into the sunset to perform
more dastardly deeds as Artemis completes
his botched metamorphosis into
a criminal mastermind,
setting up sequels that are
now as dead as his mom.
Because this movie isn’t in a
position to please anyone.
Kids are going to find this boring, adults
will find it confusing, newcomers will find
it baffling, and fans of the
books will find it enraging.
I do feel bad for the people who worked on
it and tried to make it something good,
but the end result is a complete mess that’s
a waste of everybody’s time and money.
Why even make this if they were going to 
butcher it as badly as a pig in a blender?
There was so much potential here
that was utterly wasted.
I really hope this gets a reboot,
or a TV show or something,
because this is Game of Thrones
Season 8 levels of disappointment.
And I’d really hate for *this* to be all that
fans of the books are left with.
Because Artemis Fowl will now be my go-to
example - alongside The Last Airbender -
of a movie that is both a terrible adaptation,
and a terrible movie in its own right.
So that’s just *one* more thing from my
childhood that Disney ruined for a quick buck.
Any more and I might have to sue
them for emotional damage.
But for now, I’ll leave you with a quote
that perfectly sums up my current mood.
“TOP OF THE MORNIN'!”
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