Sci-Fi Film Review – Titan A.E. (2000)

Anyone who has worked retail knows that the customer is often wrong. By extension, the market is often wrong. Nowhere is that truer than at the box office, where a copy-paste rehash can rake in billions if it pushes the right buttons, while audiences turn up their noses at works of genuine beauty and creativity. The subject of this review lands firmly in that second camp. Titan A.E., the last big-screen production of legendary animator Don Bluth¹, lost at least $40 million during its 2000 release, leading directly to the demise of Fox Animation Studios. Yet—it’s one of the greatest animated science fiction films ever made. Let’s dive in.

We begin with a voiceover to set the stage. It is the year 3028, and humanity is on the cusp of a vast yet secretive scientific breakthrough, known only as the Titan Project. This project has drawn the attention of the Drej, a powerful and hostile race of energy beings. They fear humanity’s rapid advancements. In a surprise attack, leaving time only to evacuate a small fraction of the planet’s population, they swoop in and blast Earth to pieces with an enormous energy weapon. Among the evacuees is a young boy named Cale, the son of the head scientist on the Titan Project. In the last few minutes before Earth’s destruction, while Cale is hurriedly packed off aboard a civilian freighter, his father blasts the starship Titan off into deep space—never to be seen again.

Many years later, the remnants of the human race face extinction in a galaxy that has no place for them. Cale (voiced by Matt Damon!) ekes out a precarious living at an asteroid scrap yard, working alongside a menagerie of unfriendly aliens, cutting derelict starships to pieces and picking them clean of their useful components. He is an angsty, cynical young man. He has no time to care about the species, when he himself is just struggling to get by. He certainly isn’t eager to risk his life on any dangerous adventures. And yet…

Someone from his past comes knocking. Captain Korso (Bill Pullman), an old friend of his father, is putting together an expedition to find the lost starship Titan, defeat the Drej, and save humanity. For this, he needs Cale. You see, before Cale’s father sent him away, he gave him a special ring—a ring that, when combined with his DNA, contains a map to the Titan‘s hiding place. Cale isn’t convinced, but sudden attack by the Drej leaves him with little choice but to go along. The hero must answer the call to adventure, whether he likes it or not!

So Cale joins Korso and his crew of misfits. There’s Akima (Drew Barrymore), snarky crack pilot and Cale’s love interest; Stith (Janeane Garofalo), a towering kangaroo-like alien with serious anger issues; Preed (Nathan Lane), of a species very much like an anthropomorphic bat, who acts as Korso’s bleakly sarcastic second-in-command; and Gune (John Leguizamo), a small, bespectacled alien as brilliant as he is eccentric (also my personal favorite character in this movie). Appropriately for an animated adventure film, these are all visually distinctive characters with even more distinct personalities. And there aren’t too many of them! Unlike, say, the billion-and-a-half superheroes of the later Avengers movies, Titan A.E. has a manageable cast, easy to keep track of.

Our heroes strike out across the galaxy in search of the lost Titan, following the map in Cale’s ring. The problem is, the Drej are on the same quest, and they aim to get there first, destroy the Titan, and thus squash any hope² of humanity finding a new homeworld. So it’s a race—complete with thrilling heroics and eye-popping action. And some betrayal. Let’s just say, the plot isn’t completely straightforward, and not every character introduced as a hero turns out to be one.

Along the way, we get to see some truly striking set pieces. The imagination on display is stunning; Don Bluth deserves his reputation as a master of animation. One planet they visit, Sesharrim, hosts a ruined city of almost organic architecture, inhabited by eerily silent bat-creatures, surrounded by a mangrove of trees crowned with bubbles of hydrogen. It’s quite the spot for a speedboat chase, once the Drej show up.

Other locations of interest: a station built from derelict spacecraft, hosting the surviving refugees from Earth; an energy storm of fiery pillars, inhabited by glowing deep-space manta rays; an ice nebula, where snowflakes the size of cities crash endlessly against each other. It’s hard to do it justice with my screengrabs, but trust me, this movie is a feat of visual worldbuilding, and a feast for the eyes.

Is the plot of Titan A.E. a particularly original or groundbreaking? No, but it’s not trying to be. Don Bluth’s goal here was to give us space opera, writ large, hitting the classic beats of the hero’s journey while delivering snappy dialogue and breathtaking settings. In that respect, he succeeded magnificently. This is a film that engages the viewer pretty much the whole way through. There’s a lot packed into its hour-and-a-half runtime.

It’s also remarkably dark, for an animated feature. We see slave markets and refugee camps. Characters get seriously injured, with onscreen blood. Characters die. In one scene, Korso puts someone else in a chokehold, then kills them by snapping their neck. And of course, Earth and nearly all its inhabitants get vaporized right out of the gate. I, personally, enjoyed this grittier edge. Even animated family films shouldn’t be afraid to get their hands dirty.

My criticisms are relatively few. One is that the Drej are a tad underdeveloped as villains. They want to destroy humanity for… reasons? Something about viewing the human race as a threat? The Drej Queen gets subtitled dialogue—bland lines like “Destroy³ the humans. Destroy them all”—but otherwise, they’re a voiceless race, offering no insights into what they believe or how their civilization operates.

My other qualm is with the animation. The traditional hand-drawn stuff is gorgeous, mind you, but not so much the abundant CGI, which was meant to add depth for some panning/zoom-out shots. It wasn’t ready for prime time in the year 2000. It has aged… poorly.

Questionable CGI aside, Titan A.E. offers a case study in what 2D animation is capable of. No live-action film could have been quite so fluid, quite so zany, quite so splendidly imaginative. Don Bluth ran rampant with this one, in the best way possible. Even the basic concept was a bold move on his part: post-apocalyptic animated sci-fi, a whole lot darker than what Disney was putting out around that time.

Really, there’s little else like it. Perhaps audiences didn’t quite know how to react at first. While Titan A.E. may have lost Fox Studios a lot of money, that doesn’t matter, looking back after two decades—it’s still a great movie. If you’re one for thrills, spectacle, and old-fashioned space adventure, this is absolutely one you should check out.

Rating: 9/10. Strongly recommended.

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1. Also known for: The Secret of NIMH, The Land Before Time, Anastasia, and many others. During the 1980s, he founded his own studio and gave Disney some serious competition. ↩︎
2. Exactly what the Titan is, or does, is not revealed until fairly late in the film—but it has to do with terraforming. ↩︎
3. One plot hole: the Drej allow a fleet of defenseless refugee ships to escape into space, even when they can clearly track down and destroy them. It’s a marvel any humans survived at all. ↩︎