Introduction:
We all have movies that we don't like; usually we should choose not to watch movies that we don't like, but not if the film perpetuates dangerous notions. I very rarely review a movie that I don't like; and Titan AE, like Ben Stein's anti-reality flick Expelled, is one of those rare occasions. On Friday, June 16, 2000, a toxic science fiction anime film called Titan AE opened in theaters, and I hated the film with a purple passion because they chose to have a spaceship destroy our planet just to get its points across. Titan AE perpetuates dangerous notions that fly in the face of everything I spend a lifetime protecting, I'm 27. Before you accuse me of "missing the point", I do understand that people that enjoy this harmful film get good messages of hope, second chances, finding a home, human spirit, mortality, and father and son. But such messages do not excuse the horrific means that were used to get them across in this film, because such points can be delivered without the horrors of Titan AE and are really worth while if not for the awful ways of Titan AE.
I have watched Titan AE on VHS even though I did not like it and I was lucky there was a behind the scenes and a music video after the film, we all do strange things sometimes. I also visited Titan AE websites, and I did all of this so I learn about the topic first before trying to shoot it down. And yes, I can easily shoot down Titan AE because the handwavium is voluminous and contradictions populate the storyline. Titan AE does not deserve my suspension of disbelief because its universe has zero heft and zero reality. Even Star Wars which its creator George Lucas rightfully points out is not even science fiction does not possess this putrid level of handwavium, Titan AE which is science fiction on the other hand is pure handwavium.
Movie Review:
Titan AE opens with the most vile and indecent premise of all time, the race to evacuate our planet just to save a magical spaceship called the Titan Project. The terrorist group known as the Drej destroy our planet that there is not much care on the surviving humans part of the deaths of billions of other people or billions of other species on Earth. According to the Titan AE Technology Website that I first visited in 2002, the Crystalline Drej Ship, Alahenena, destroyed many alien worlds as well, killing at least TRILLIONS of innocent lives and TRILLIONS of other species. The surviving humans did not care how many alien civilizations the Drej also wiped out, this is horrendously genocidal. The authors give this macabre excuse, "Nobody can defeat the Drej because they are pure energy." Then if there was "no way to defeat the Drej", why would they feel so threatened by us creating planets as to want to destroy the planet we live on. This premise is utter bilge, it does not make any shred of sense. I am against this film for reasons I like Star Trek and peace movements like Breasts Not Bombs. Star Trek teaches us to preserve our planet and to protect others rather than just saving yourself. Breasts Not Bombs is a women's peace movement where women display their breasts in public to show the vulnerability of our species and our planet. Titan AE blatantly violates both of these to the T!
Our hero who has to find the Titan; Cale Tucker (Matt Damon), is an unruly thug. The only Disney character that I can liken Cale to is Gaston from Beauty And The Beast. Non-Disney characters that remind me of Cale are Biff Tannen from Back To The Future, Anikin Skywalker from the last two Star Wars Prequels, Draco Malfoy from Harry Potter, and Nero from the 2009 JJ Abrams Star Trek movie. The crew of the Valkyrie is no better, they are dysfunctional and do not make a good team until their captain, Joesph Korso (Bill Pullman) slays Preed (Nathan Lane). The Drej are finally defeated when Cale uses his ring to activate this Titan and drain the enemy ship as it fires. Then he creates a New Earth he gives a funny name, "Planet BOB", what kind of a name for a planet is just "BOB", you get laughed at!
In the Over My Head music video for Titan AE, the band, Lit, when the Earth blew up, they laughed and thought that it was funny! I got news for you Lit, blowing up Earth is NOT funny and it is NOT a game, it is bloody serious!
Handwavium & Contradictions:
The first handwavium I will discuss is the Titan Project, a magical spaceship that has the power to create an entire habitable planet within a day. Give me a break, this cannot work, it violates the laws of physics. Planet formation requires an accretion disc around a newborn star or around a stellar corpse such as a pulsar or neutron star. It is a slow process taking at least hundreds of thousands of years, and we know this because astronomers see different new planetary systems in different stages of formation. On Terraforming, it is not the same as creating the planet, it only means to make an already existing planet such as Mars Earthlike, and would be a process taking a time period that is longer than a century. The Titan will not work, that spaceship is totally unreal.
There is FTL in this movie, no warping space or taking shortcuts like wormholes, this flat out violates the laws of physics. Warp drive is theoretically possible as theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre has shown, and worm holes are theoretically possible as people like Kip Thorne showed. I will return to these two concepts in later posts. The starships land and take off from plants with ease, this cannot work either, a starship stays in space and uses shuttle craft to ferry crews to and from planetary surfaces.
Now for the greatest handwavium of all, the pure-contradiction based Drej. The first contradiction is saying that there is no way to defeat the Drej because they are "pure energy" yet you have sucking their power as a means to defeat them. How can you say there is no way to defeat the Drej yet you depict a way to defeat them, that does not make any sense? The next contradiction is that the both Drej and their spacecraft are "pure energy" yet they have bodies and their vessel has solid floors and walls for us humans to walk and climb on. This flat out violates physics because pure energy cannot be tangible, and if there is any real pure energy life out their, it would be without a body and not tangible. There is a term for life that does not have a body, non-corporeal.
Another asinine aspect about the Drej Mothership is that it contains an entire white dwarf. A white dwarf is a star with the mass of our sun shrunk down to the size of Earth, and the Drej Warship is 7.62 kilometers long, how can you fit a dense object the size of our planet in a spaceship only as big as a mountain, this cannot work! Another problem is that the artificial gravity on the Drej Ship is equal to that of Earth despite housing a mass equal to that of the sun. The gravity would be equal to that of our sun and the ship would turn into a sphere due to the gravity, not retain its crystalline design.
Titan AE's Logical Fallacies:
Titan AE fans who are sensitive to criticism often use Ad Hominem attacks and set up Straw Men. An Ad Hominem is a logical fallacy in which you reject an opponent's argument and attack the person instead of the argument, like with name-calling or profanity. This is fallacious because attacking the person does not necessarily prove your conclusion to be correct. A Straw Man is a logical fallacy in which you distort an opponent's argument and later claim to heroically defeat your opponent. This is fallacious because distorting an argument does not constitute taking on the argument as it actually is head on. Titan AE fans do use other fallacies like Appeal To Force (Argumentum Ad Baculum) where they threaten people who disagree with them or Appeal to Numbers (Argumentun Ad Numerum) where they use the greater number of people who like Titan AE and the lesser number who dislike Titan AE to try and prove their point. These are both fallacious because neither the threat of force or larger numbers necessarily prove the conclusion to be correct. If you commit any logical fallacy, I will detect it, shoot it down, and point it out to you!
My Personal Fears About Titan AE:
I also particularly dislike this film because it brings up my deepest childhood regret. Titan AE brings up memories of a dark time when I once hated the characters Timon and Pumbaa from Lion King all because of something that I misinterpreted. I call this past obsession Anti-Timon & Pumbaa Fanaticism (ATPF) and it lasted for over 706 days from the morning of Saturday, August 26, 1995 until the evening of Friday, August 1, 1997; and yes, this was in a time before Titan AE. But this alone is not reason to oppose Titan AE, I am against it because it perpetuates dangerous propositions, and would be even if it were not for ATPF.
Motives:
Titan AE was created by Don Bulth and Gary Wayne Goldman as their revenge attempt against Lion King for Disney overtaking him, by wiping out the World of The Lion King with the push of a button from outer space. The Drej Planet Buster was ideal for that task, but they got careless as to fill up their story with pure handwavium and contradictions, thus creating a massive Achilles heel. They also did not think that there would be space-based opposition to the attack on Lion King, boy, were they in for a shock. That is exactly why I am glad that Titan AE was a FLOP that will never ever stop flopping around! The Orion II Starship for example did a number on the Crystalline Drej Ship many times and hit many home runs on Titan AE's agenda. The irony is that Don Bluth helped make the Disney Renaissance possible during his tenure at Disney yet was jealous when Lion King overtook him. This sounds eeriely similar to a problem that I had in 1998 and 1999 that I will discuss in later posts, most likely multiple posts since it is a long story.
Counter Story:
To shoot down the claim that no one could save our planet from the Drej, let's remember that Titan AE's authors only considered Titan AE tech, which is ironically pathetic yet it is in the 31st Century! They did not know about the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, unusual uses of deflector dishes or deflector arrays, or interstellar ramjets, all of these are devices that could have stopped the Drej from destroying Earth. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics states that heat can never be destroyed; only dumped somewhere else, and the heat from another starship's radiators could be channeled onto the Drej Ship to the point of overloading and destroying the enemy ship. To prove this, a Star Destroyer from Star Wars can easily kill the Drej Ship with only one volley, since turbo lasers from Star Wars are NOT lasers, but high yield plasma and high temperature! The deflector dishes on Star Trek starships such as the USS Enterprise can drain the Drej Ship and boost the warp yield, so can deflector arrays and boost the ships power output. An interstellar ramjet uses a frontal ramscoop to collect interstellar hydrogen to power an engine, and this could easily gobble up the Drej Ship's energy. This invalidates the horrendous claim that no one could stop the Drej from destroying Earth.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, Titan AE is stupid, vindictive, illogical, very indecent, and outright toxic. I rate this movie as piss poor, give it an F, I give it a BIG FAT ZERO, I give it one star, I give it a 1 in a 1-10 rating. The sad thing is that some parents took their kids to see this ultra indecent and toxicant abomination in theaters as young as FIVE-YEARS-OLD!
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