MovieChat Forums > The Lorax (2012) Discussion > Let's be real here, this movie was garba...

Let's be real here, this movie was garbage

posted 12 years ago by xlangamesfl
33 replies | jump to latest

This film is an insult to all other really good CG animated movies like Despicable Me, How to Train Your Dragon, Toy Story, etc.

You don't even need to concern yourself with the propaganda discussion happening around here. It really is horrible all on it's own, no need to knock it down any further with talk of it brainwashing your children.

How about it just sucks so don't bother letting them watch it?

I feel like I could type a full review that is really long and contains all the flaws but the movie doesn't even deserve that much. But if one thing just stuck out like a sore thumb it would be the character of the Lorax. He was sent there to protect the forest.....and he didn't at all. Not even a little bit. One man and his family destroy the forest with no resistance.

Lorax gets all sad and leaves. You know, after he has just been sitting by letting this destruction come to the forest. The like 20-30 years later the man that destroyed the forest has 1 seed left to give the kid. This seed of course is pretty much magical because it seems to grow right away which triggers the once dead forest to now start growing again.....umm, ok wth?

Lorax descends from the heavens (lol) and tells the man he did a good job and they hug in the end.

Doesn't get much worse than this folks.

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[–] shayneferry 12 years ago

DAFUQ is wrong with you guys? It's awesome! The Lorax is so cool and the teddies are so cute! It's just cartoon who gives two s--ts about the political message. Cutting down trees is bad, think we already knew that anyway!

[–] nastylev 12 years ago

I don't fully agree with the OP but I will admit this is probably the most toddler-oriented animated feature in the past years. Unlike some recent films (Tangled, How to train your dragon, Wall-e) I found very little to keep me in my seat till the end of the movie.

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[–] kernaler 12 years ago

I dont agree with everything you said.... but i do agree this movie was uter crap

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[–] laeyisoracle 12 years ago

It was a mediocre movie at best. While the movie was preachy, my biggest gripe was that there were far too many songs than their should've been. I remember my sister saw it and said, "Can't they spend five effin minutes without going into a new, unneeded song that adds nothing to the story?!". I have to agree, too many needless songs. If they were songs that were placed in certain vital parts of the movie, sure. A good song, placed in a good moment could do wonders. This was not like that.

And yeah, about the preachiness. I don't think the moral of the nature's plight is a bad message to get across, but they kinda beat you over the head with it in this one. I think that's where the original story and cartoon worked. When you expand a short story into a movie, you're only going to have to fill in the hour or so with new stuff. In this case, it was using the whole industry vs environment thing over and over and over. The old cartoon carried the book's message to the point without going overboard because it couldn't. Hell, all the old 70s cartoons of the Dr. Seuss stories did their jobs extremely effectively in showing what ever message Seuss wanted to get across.

Though, the ending was extremely strange to me. First, you got that O'Hare guy who is the token villain, greedy and ready to exploit people for their money, but you are also shown that he was once a working stiff who, after the fall of Once-ler, came up with the "new big idea" to make him into a millionaire. It would've actually been interesting to see him, perhaps, open his eyes to what he was doing. Why even show him before he was rich if there was really no redemption at all?

Another thing that bothered me about the end was how the people in the town were so quick to change their opinion. These are people who were probably living their entire lives via artificial light and robot trees. All it took was the sight of a real tree and a hole in the wall to completely change their minds? Sure, they got to look out into the vast wastelands, but you'd think, given their lives, they wouldn't care. They got shelter, safety(supposed safety) and almost live in an artificial utopia. Not that people could not change their views of such things, but how they did wasn't believable. It was too saccharin.

[–] uruseiranma 12 years ago

"Though, the ending was extremely strange to me. First, you got that O'Hare guy who is the token villain, greedy and ready to exploit people for their money, but you are also shown that he was once a working stiff who, after the fall of Once-ler, came up with the "new big idea" to make him into a millionaire. It would've actually been interesting to see him, perhaps, open his eyes to what he was doing. Why even show him before he was rich if there was really no redemption at all?"

Showing O'Hare as a former working man was the filmmaker's attempts to explain just where O'Hare got his idea from. As the Once-ler's empire crumbled, O'Hare's arose from its ashes. Though the filmmakers do gloss over the fact that Thneedville wasn't always a walled-in city. So, how did O'Hare manage to brain-wash the entire populace into forgetting about trees? Or for that matter, I don't believe he's as old as Granny Norma, surely there must be others who knew the positiveness of trees. Maybe O'Hare just had them quietly wiped out, and Granny just kept her trap shut to avoid being killed off.

"Another thing that bothered me about the end was how the people in the town were so quick to change their opinion. These are people who were probably living their entire lives via artificial light and robot trees. All it took was the sight of a real tree and a hole in the wall to completely change their minds? Sure, they got to look out into the vast wastelands, but you'd think, given their lives, they wouldn't care. They got shelter, safety(supposed safety) and almost live in an artificial utopia. Not that people could not change their views of such things, but how they did wasn't believable. It was too saccharin."

Ah yes, the wonders of 'cartoon mob mentality.' The Simpsons has plenty of examples of these brain-dead masses of unified agreement.

in truth, I agree with you: most of these people would have just been, 'um, it's one seed that will grow into a tree. How is that going to help us exactly?'

These are people who have no problems with being ignorant to their smog and pollutive ways, or when a little child just starts to glow after swimming in tainted water.

Besides, in a normal world, O'Hare would have survived that head-helmet-rocket thing, come back in the night, and uprooted/destroyed the seed, claiming he saved the town from the rantings of a couple nutty kids.

"Thanks, guys." "So long, partner."

- Toy Story 3 (9/10)

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[–] rorylanelutter 11 years ago

I disagree. It sucks because it's a shameless excuse to make money, using the character as a marketing icon, rather than telling the story the book was based on.

It's not as though it just embellished the story a bit for the film. I could understand if it needed some extra stuff to fill 1:30 minutes, but the movie abandons the core premise of the book: that a everything turned out badly.

It's a cautionary tale, and the Lorax is not some eccentric environmentalist. The Lorax was prophetic of a catastrophe.

Anyway, yeah, it sucked, but it also sucked for what the film represents... Using a beloved children's book for the sake of a marketing campaign, in order to deliver a bland piece of crap which betrays the premise of the original.

Crap, and a huge waste of a great story.

[–] info-12388 10 years ago

Sure it does. There's a movie opening in May of next year, about this guy who said he was gonna change the world. Didnt really do much of anything except cause trouble for a lot of folks. Then some other people got wise to him and hung him out to dry. Now even more people are waiting for him to descend from Heaven and make it all okay again.

Oh yeah. like he's so interested in people now that he cant be bothered to fix anything, like, you know, *now*.....

Oh, the movie? "Son of God".