So I watched the Lorax....
And I'm too lazy to write a book on it. But I will do what I hope is a decent review!
With no spoilers! :D
I'm sure you might have guessed by now that my opinion may or may not reflect what everyone else has already said about this movie. And to an extent... it does. It has it's good points, but still, this is not what you would call a "good" movie. At the best it's average. I'm right fresh off seeing it, and words cannot describe how underwhelmed I feel.
And -- wait for it -- I even feel underwhelmed with what they did with the Once-ler. My online experience for the past week has been me gawking at his growing cult of fans. There are hundreds of them! The way they were describing him and worshiping him made me think I was going to be super invested in his parts. Don't get me wrong, he's still the best part of the movie by far... but I was expecting him to save the movie.
Which he does not. And and the reason he doesn't save the movie is because there isn't more of him. I mean, his character wasn't outright wasted. He's adorkable. He's likable. You hate that he becomes what he becomes. He had the best lines, the best moments, you know the drill.
But just like everyone else, I think it would have been monumentally better if they had just kept to his storyline, with Ted being an audience surrogate like he was in the books. But this is a modern day reboot, so of course the kid has to be the main protagonist and he has to have his backstory. Granted, I do kind of like the idea behind Thneedville becoming this fake-ass town made of plastic where everyone lives in blissful ignorance, it's just that they never expand on it. The town just kind of... exists. I know Thneedville is not the most original idea (WALL-E and countless other stories anyone?), but I'm not looking for originality. I'm looking for a movie that draws me in and keeps me there.
And that's why The Lorax is not that good. The Once-ler and his parts are just kind of there. The kid is just kind of there. The horrible cardboard cutout villain O'Hare is there. The Lorax is there. The little animal things are there. The music is there. The message is there. (Special mention for flatness goes to the humor. Joke after joke kept on falling flat.) Everything's there, but very little sticks. Other than maybe the Once-ler (and I have to admit, even that's kind of stretching it for me at this point), no part of it had a chance to impact me.
What gets me the most is that this movie did not have to be bad. It's one big "could-have". It could have really gone deep with the Once-ler's story and made him from a good character to an awesome character. Hell, they could have done Ted's story a whole lot better, if the writers had really wanted to. It's just that everything was so rushed, so poorly paced that it all came out even more flat and boring than I was expecting. The Lorax has no soul to it. It's all fantastic animation and one silly, memorable character but lacks the depth it needs to last.
And of course, even though they do address the one problem I had with the original (the fact that nobody ever thinks just to pluck the foliage from the trees), the traditional cartoon is still better, being as ancient as it is. It took the time to let the story breathe. It didn't feel the need to switch back and forth between plot lines or rely on spectacle or anything.
Personally, I could care less that they rebooted the Once-ler completely to try and make him more sympathetic and attractive. It worked, but just enough to get by. If only someone had just thought to focus the whole movie on him and the Lorax. If only someone had thought to explore their relationship a bit more. There's no emotional connection. It's just a moving picture on a screen.
TL;DR 6/10 (it would be five out of ten without the Once-ler's green pimp suite). In terms of rebooting Dr. Seuss movies, Horton Hears a Who was a whole lot better. Hopefully, future reboots of his work will be more like that one.
Oh, and by the way, Universal is already mulling over doing a sequel! Shame? What in the world is shame?