So we went and saw Shrek: Forever After last night over at the AMC in Plainville as to finally use up that AMC gift card we’ve had since this past Christmas or the one before. Sharing the theater with maybe 10 other people at most, it was a fairly decent movie with the 3D experience, though my eye was watering and burning all throughout the movie which made it dreadfully annoying with 3D glasses on.
If you’ve seen the first three movies, the fourth will be pretty much the same, which was good and bad. The fantastic thing about the first was that it was an animated feature that incorporated animated characters fitting traditional archetypes, a feared, yet lonely orge, an annoying yet loyal donkey, and a typical imprisoned princess that happened to have an interesting curse on her. All of this while lampooning fairy tales and mixing adult humor made it a movie for not just children, but teens and adults. The second and third movies tried to capture this magic, and did in many places, but you could tell the franchise, especially after being taken over by the marketing muscle of fast-food promotions, toys, and video games, had lost it’s edge it worked so hard to obtain.
The fourth movie plays out after the third, with his orge wife Fiona, three kids, Donkey & Dragon and their donkey-dragon babies, and Puss in Boots, Shrek found himself not enjoying the married orge life, longing for the days when it was just him, his swamp, and feared townspeople everywhere. Signing a magical contract with Rumpelstiltskin, who previously almost got the King and Queen to sign one for Fiona, he is granted a day of being free again, only he failed to read the fine print and traded away the day of his birth, causing all of the events from the previous movies to cease to exist. In this alternate timeline, Rumpel rules the kingdom with the witches at his command, and Fiona leads a resistance of orges to combat his forces.
The story itself is fairly linear and doesn’t take too many deviations, including predictable twists, which kinda left me wishing they threw a little more to you for the final chapter. It felt a lot like playing out a time-travel episode of Star Trek where the only way to fix the time line was to destroy the source of what caused it to distort in the first place. I won’t spoil that for those who haven’t seen the movie, but once you realize what has to be done to fix the fairly tale and have it end happily ever after, you feel a little sheepish because it was kinda obvious.
The characters didn’t really deviate much from past movies either. Shrek was kinda dry, a few one-liners here and there, several witty quips, but nothing that really drove him home. Donkey and Puss rather probably stood out better in this one, though not by much, especially Alternate Donkey and Puss who were simply hilarious in the one-liner department. I found I liked Alternate Fiona a lot in this movie as she played off a lot better not knowing Shrek or anyone else and instead focusing on her rebellion, it had a Princess Leia touch to it in a way. Rumpel being the only new major character was your evil villain who tried to be evil, but often failed on the account of overlooking things and being generally retarded.
Was it worth the price of admission? Marginally, I probably could have waited until DVD for it and not cared too much, but considering we had the AMC card it was either that or Toy Story 3 and I still want to see Toy Story 3, though I think we’re waiting to put a party together for it. It should be pretty epic, like all Pixar films have been.