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Artemis Fowl: The Movie

Would you watch this?

  • Total voters
    156
I am kinda sad it won't hit theaters, as it would have been interesting to see how bad it bombed.
 
Again, I'm going to recommend the graphic novels for those who wish to relive the Artemis Fowl books in a visual format.
 
So... who's seen it yet? How bad was it?

www.rollingstone.com

'Artemis Fowl' Review: When YA-Classic Adaptations Go Wrong

'Artemis Fowl' turns a popular YA-lit series about an evil boy genius into another bland Disney product. Read Peter Travers' review.
www.rollingstone.com www.rollingstone.com

Ouch... 1 1/2 stars out of five.

For starters, it's no Harry Potter. But when Aretmis Fowl debuts on Disney + on June 12th, you'll wonder why this fussed-over and broken film version of Irish author Eoin Colfer's young-adult bestseller — about a 12-year-old criminal mastermind — had to be this dramatically inert and emotionally barren.
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Shanejayell said:
So... who's seen it yet? How bad was it?
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Going by the reviews, it's complete omnishambles and not just a terrible adaption but a terrible movie on it's own, with Josh Gad narrating it in a Batman voice talking about how Artemis Fowl is the greatest and most likeable boy in the world.

And Butler cannot be called Butler despite that being his surname, you can only call him Dom.
 
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I knew next to nothing about Artemis Fowl other than it was a book series and apparently the kid is evil? Nothing really impressed me about the trailer but my 12 year old wanted to watch it. And I was bored enough watching it I fell asleep a few times before half watching it and doing whatever on my phone. I spent most of it wondering when the kid was going to start robbing banks or something.
 
LordDarthYoda said:
I knew next to nothing about Artemis Fowl other than it was a book series and apparently the kid is evil? Nothing really impressed me about the trailer but my 12 year old wanted to watch it. And I was bored enough watching it I fell asleep a few times before half watching it and doing whatever on my phone. I spent most of it wondering when the kid was going to start robbing banks or something.
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In the books, Artemis is basically a preteen Moriarty. Master criminal, all that jazz. The first book is a freaking hostage situation with him having kidnapped Holly and ransoming her for gold, with Holly and the LEP trying to beat him and in the end kind of failing though Artemis also IIRC shows hints that he's got a heart under there somewhere and has a bit of a positive arc. Later books then have him working alongside the LEP against other threats like Opal Koboi and slowly becoming a genuinely heroic person, though he consistently shows himself to be very intelligent and very ruthless even when he is on the side of the angels (at least until the books got bad anyway).

By all accounts this film has basically nothing to do with any of that. It's a generic kid adventure movie with the loosest of associations stapled on, just enough for the licensing to work.
 
Lunatic350 said:
In the books, Artemis is basically a preteen Moriarty. Master criminal, all that jazz. The first book is a freaking hostage situation with him having kidnapped Holly and ransoming her for gold, with Holly and the LEP trying to beat him and in the end kind of failing though Artemis also IIRC shows hints that he's got a heart under there somewhere and has a bit of a positive arc. Later books then have him working alongside the LEP against other threats like Opal Koboi and slowly becoming a genuinely heroic person, though he consistently shows himself to be very intelligent and very ruthless even when he is on the side of the angels (at least until the books got bad anyway).

By all accounts this film has basically nothing to do with any of that. It's a generic kid adventure movie with the loosest of associations stapled on, just enough for the licensing to work.
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Yeah I got that sense from the movie early on.
Woke at one point to faeries getting sucked into a time warp of doom or something while the one he kidnapped goes "Let's be Besties!" and saved Butler from the very obvious death fake out and everyone's all buddy buddy for a way too long chase from a troll. Plus something about mutiny in the fairy ranks? I was totally lost.
I think I'm getting events mixed up though.
 
Gul Damar said:
Going by the reviews, it's complete omnishambles and not just a terrible adaption but a terrible movie on it's own, with Josh Gad narrating it in a Batman voice talking about how Artemis Fowl is the greatest and most likeable boy in the world.
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I mean to be fair by the later books Colfer started doing the same with Artemis.
 
And reading through the thread from what I understand is they did smash the first two books together despite what the author said.
 
Humble H Dweller said:
Gods, this was so easy to get ri

Irish Die Hard with fairies.

So simple an idea, so severely mangled.
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Honestly, the big issue is that Artemis Fowl doesn't really translate well to a kids action-adventure film. The first book is much more like a heist film, with a lot of POV changes and move/countermove with only like 2 or 3 big action scenes with most of the plot internal with characters thinking things through. It could certainly work, but I think the final product would bore kids given the medium. What best works for books does not work for movies.

LordDarthYoda said:
And reading through the thread from what I understand is they did smash the first two books together despite what the author said.
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What? How? The first two books are totally different in terms of story, setting, and plot. How can you combine the two with any success?
 
Artemis Fowl isn't a stereotypical kids book. It's much closer to YA or the mature kids style of Roald Dahl. Disney either didn't realise that or didn't care and just wanted to use the IP they had.
 
What's crazy is the more I'm looking up it starts sounding like book Artemis and Light Yagami would get along way too well. The movie version isn't that.
 
LordDarthYoda said:
What's crazy is the more I'm looking up it starts sounding like book Artemis and Light Yagami would get along way too well. The movie version isn't that.
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Ehh, I don't think Artemis would try to kill people, criminals or otherwise, and seeing as that was one of Light's big things they'd probably only end up as enemies if they met. Artemis is smart, sure, but he does stuff to benefit him (and friends/the planet, later on) and isn't too fussed about turning to criminal methods in order to do so.
 
LordDarthYoda said:
What's crazy is the more I'm looking up it starts sounding like book Artemis and Light Yagami would get along way too well. The movie version isn't that.
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Artemis would likely get along much more with L if they could get over the fact they're on opposite sides of the law most of the time. Light is too preachy and his plans too involved.
 
Mizu said:
Ehh, I don't think Artemis would try to kill people, criminals or otherwise, and seeing as that was one of Light's big things they'd probably only end up as enemies if they met. Artemis is smart, sure, but he does stuff to benefit him (and friends/the planet, later on) and isn't too fussed about turning to criminal methods in order to do so.
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VolantRedX said:
Artemis would likely get along much more with L if they could get over the fact they're on opposite sides of the law most of the time. Light is too preachy and his plans too involved.
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Ok I stand corrected. Guess I focused too much on the criminal in criminal mastermind.
 
Sounds very similar to the sad case of Earthsea. There's a very good Folding Ideas video on that - it's where I got the term Adaptation Sickness from.
 
This movie is wrong from literally the first time it shows the main character and it never stops fucking up from there. It was a nightmare of an experience which I never would have been able to sit through without regularly posting screencaps to Discord so I could see everyone lose their shit at what was unfolding. There was precisely two (2) moments that made me laugh on purpose, 10% on the Moist Meter.

EDIT: Easily the most distracting part of the movie is that Dame Judi Dench has all the physical presence of a warmed-up corpse that someone propped up with sticks. I think she was only moving in literally one scene? In all the others she's sitting on a chair or standing on a hover-podium thing or leaning on a railing, and her voice is this hoarse grumble that blows past 'grizzled smoker captain' to 'mummy relearning how to use its lungs and vocal cords'. She was somehow the most miscast person in a cast entirely full of miscast people.
 
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Lunatic350 said:
In the books, Artemis is basically a preteen Moriarty. Master criminal, all that jazz. The first book is a freaking hostage situation with him having kidnapped Holly and ransoming her for gold, with Holly and the LEP trying to beat him and in the end kind of failing though Artemis also IIRC shows hints that he's got a heart under there somewhere and has a bit of a positive arc.
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My impression is that he was more a Sly Cooper-esque "its ok for me to steal from evil people because they suck". He'd assumed that the fae folk were inhuman assholes as would be the case in a lot of fiction, and decided to show how galaxy-brained he is by outwitting a race mythologically famous for their wiliness. By the time he realized they were pretty much just regular people he was in too deep and couldn't stop. When Butler says "Never again. Fairies are too… human," Artemis agrees to stick with "more tasteful ventures". It has been a long-ass time since I read the first few so maybe I'm misremembering it.
 
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firefossil said:
My impression is that he was more a Sly Cooper-esque "its ok for me to steal from evil people because they suck". He'd assumed that the fae folk were inhuman assholes as would be the case in a lot of fiction, and decided to show how galaxy-brained he is by outwitting a race mythologically famous for their wiliness. By the time he realized they were pretty much just regular people he was in too deep and couldn't stop. When Butler says "Never again. Fairies are too… human," Artemis agrees to stick with "more tasteful ventures". It has been a long-ass time since I read the first few so maybe I'm misremembering it.
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Actually Artemis was originally a hard criminal. Like selling endangered species on the black market, insider trading, and all sorts of smuggling. His family was basically a crime family since before the Normans arrived in England and had been following that tradition. That's actually how his father went missing, he was smuggling things into the fallen Soviet Union and the Russian mob killed him over turf. The issue Butler has is not with the Faires, but with kidnapping. Which Artemis agrees to, focusing on "tasteful ventures". It's only after he recovers his father and has a handful of adventures does he turn away from criminality all together.
 
VolantRedX said:
Actually Artemis was originally a hard criminal. Like selling endangered species on the black market, insider trading, and all sorts of smuggling. His family was basically a crime family since before the Normans arrived in England and had been following that tradition. That's actually how his father went missing, he was smuggling things into the fallen Soviet Union and the Russian mob killed him over turf. The issue Butler has is not with the Faires, but with kidnapping. Which Artemis agrees to, focusing on "tasteful ventures". It's only after he recovers his father and has a handful of adventures does he turn away from criminality all together.
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Not quite accurate. He was a fairly hardened thief, but IIRC he sold the lemur to fund attempts to find his father, and his dad was trying to make a legitimate business venture into Russia that was ambushed by the Russian mafia who didn't take kindly to it.

He's still ruthless as shit though, the literal first thing he does is secretly poison a sprite and tell her outright he'll let her die if she doesn't give him the Book for a while. Artemis was an absolute bastard child whose sole redeeming feature in book 1 was how much he cared for his mother, and that he was willing to trade away half the gold he got in exchange for her healing.
 
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