For a reason I can neither remember nor comprehend, I spent the last forty minutes reading Bob's godawful Captain Planet pitch. It was twice as long as the Megaman one, and twice as empty and soulless. The best way to describe it is: Bob tried to apply the MCU formula to Captain Planet, and ended up making something akin to Batman V Superman.
I wanna try to get through this review as quickly as possible, because Bob wastes so much goddamn time on fucking nothing in his pitches. I'll separate my critiques down to simple bullet points. If this drags on a bit, forgive me. There's just so much garbage and I think part of my brain broke while reading this.
TLDR at the end, more mercy for you than fatty gave me.
Let's go.
1) The characters all suck
First thing you'd wanna do when rebooting Captain Planet is improve the flat characterization, right? Bob makes you think he's going to do that by listing them all individually and telling you how they're different... but nobody is any different. Wheeler is a stoner with dreads and he's supposed to be less of a dick, the Asian girl is explicitly Chinese (Bob thought she was just vaguely Asian, but she was Korean) and in the most drastic change of all, Linka is now a Muslim girl with a different name. In his words, it's because have a character from the former Soviet Union is no longer "novel." Which is kind of a shitty and disgusting way to talk about the ethnicity of your characters and shows what he really thinks of diversity. It's a novelty gimmick.
In the original show, the Planeteers were meant to represent every continent. They even state this simple fact in the intro. By race-swapping Linka, he's fucked up that dynamic completely. The villain of the movie is ZARM. In the show, Zarm was the former spirit of the earth who became corrupted by the greed and hatred of mankind and turned evil. In this version, he's a big scary alien Lovecraft monster. Somehow, Bob's vision of the series has less depth than the original. How do you fuck up that bad? Of course, Bob actually manages to do something vaguely interesting with the blob monster, but I'll get back to that later.
Dr. Blight, instead of being a pollution-fetishist, is now an Eco-scientist tech sis who believes the earth is literally a sentient being and is driven mad trying to speak to it's spirit, Gaia. Of course, none of this really matters. You could cut out her entire subplot and lose nothing. She's just there to set up the villain for the hypothetical sequel. It's a slightly interesting twist and a character arc but I think I'm just being overly-generous to try to find something redeeming in this waste of time.
Interesting, unlike the Megaman pitch, there's actually some attempt at character development and arcs here. It feels like an afterthought, or just a Marvel team-movie trope, but it's something this one improves over the last one. Ma-Ti is kind of the center of the story and he's there to teaches the team how to be more empathetic and helps them all bond. But, of course, it isn't that substantial and takes a back seat to...
2) Boring, overly-long, budget-bloating action scenes
You guys ever see that RedLetterMedia bit where Mike tries to explain what Hollywood thinks is a "strong female character" and it's just a stock action-hero backstory and a description of a bunch of action scenes and car chases? That's Bob's pitches in a fucking nutshell. A huge amount of time is spent describing how the heroes do cool things with their powers, the explosions and special effects, all of the crap we can't actually see and just have to imagine. None of it actually advances the plot, none of it helps us understand the concept better and could easily be described in a single sentence instead. But to Bob, this is what a movie is. A montage of cool action scenes with filler between. It's so goddamn soulless I don't wanna spend anymore time talking about it. Now that it's out of the way, we can move forward.
3) Attempts to be self-aware and modern, ends up being just as corny and clueless as the original show
You can tell Bob was thinking "that 90s cartoon is so cheesy! I'm going to fix that!" There's little cheeky, "self-aware" moments where it turns out the Planeteers and Captain Planet were named by a marketing team, and jokes about how "superheroes are big right now" and stuff that feels like limp-wristed attempts at satire. But at the same time, nothing is significantly different from the original cartoon and nothing is smarter, and Bob's pitch relies heavily on modern trends, tropes and cliches itself, right down to copying the Marvel formula beat-for-beat. In attempting to make the source material feel modern and self-aware, it comes off just as clueless and dated as the original.
There's also some hamfisted satire of Fox News and Duke Nukem (not that one, the Captain Planet one) is basically Bill O'Reily. Extremely trope-y, done before and tried. But I'm sure Bob thought it was cutting edge at the time. But thankfully, now I get to talk about the actually redeeming part:
4) The Ma-Ti Subplot is surprisingly good (graded on a curve)
Bob surprised me with this, though my standards for him are rock-bottom. At the start of the pitch, we see the "ancient" planeteer Shamans fighting the big monster, except for the original "Heart" shaman, who they beat up and kicked out of their club. It turns out, his heart power allowed him to empathize with the monster, and he was able to realize the monster was actually just an alien that was lashing out because it was scared and confused, stuck on a planet it didn't recognize. When he tried to help it, the other Shamans kicked his ass and labeled him as a traitor, and recorded him as such in their ancient manuscripts.
Later, his ghost haunts Ma-Ti throughout the movie, and eventually it catches up with him and drags him back to his secret cave to poz his little brown neghole show him the truth. Once Ma-Ti realizes this, the shaman is able to repair his magic ring and give it to Ma-Ti, finally becoming Heart. In the final battle, he rejoins the Planeteers and they're finally able to restabilize Captain Planet and make him his "pure" form, finally saving the day.
Foreshadowing, a subplot that ties into the main plot, set ups, pay offs and a subversion of expectations? This is all Screenplay 101 shit I'd expect from anyone, but the fact that Bob is actually capable of this is surprising to me. It was the only redeeming part of this trashfire for me. The perfect metaphor for the absolute state of this piece of shit is how the revelation Ma-Ti was having kept getting interrupted by cutting back to mindless action scenes and villain cameos, while I was impatiently waiting to see where it was going. It really shows everything wrong with MovieBob's philosophy on film. Pseudo-Style over substance.
I probably would've liked this pitch better if were shorted and cut the fucking fat. It's 90 fucking paragraphs long and I'm sure at least half of those are dedicated to describing how cool their powers look in CGI and how they do a totally cool thing that stops a bad guy, like a sugar-high eight year old describing a dream he had.
5) Point of a Pitch vs what Bob did
This is something that hit me about 45 paragraphs in and stuck with me the whole time: what's the point of a pitch? You're "pitching" a concept to someone who could theoretically make it happen, or at least pretending to. You're supposed to make the idea appealing and interesting so that someone will want to actually produce your idea and make it a reality.
I imagined myself as a movie executive, having Bob recite this idea to me in an office room through a power-point presentation. And it was an agonizing mental image because I could just imagine sitting there, bored out of my skull, totally disinterested and not listening, trying to figure out a way to get him out of my office once it's over but not hurt his feelings or let him know I'm rejecting it until my secretary calls him tomorrow.
This runs totally contrary to what a "pitch" is actually supposed to be. It doesn't explain what makes this "new" version of Captain Planet interesting, unique or worth your time, it doesn't bother try to sell an idea or make itself interesting, it's just a dry, beat-for-beat IMDB-style synopsis of an imaginary movie that already assumes it has your attention. I would definitely reject it, and so would you.
6) Final Verdict (TLDR)
There's nothing special or unique about Bob's take on Captain Planet. He didn't reinvent the show or universe, he didn't even change anything. It's all the same. Bob just took the original Captain Planet, applied the bare-bones MCU formula to it, added some modern movie tropes/trends and called it a fucking day. It's an imitation Marvel movie without anything that makes the good MCU movies watchable. I probably put more thought into this review than Bob did while writing it.
Don't be like me, don't waste your life reading Bob's shitty fanfiction. Go outside, touch grass and be fucking productive. Pity me, my friends, for the folly of my ways.
