Growing up, I adored Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl series. I loved that it provided a modern take on classic fairy figures, that the female lead was smart and strong, that the main character wasn’t the typical innocent child figure and was an anti-hero. It was something different.
I was aware that talk of a film adaptation was drifting around the internet but it was one of those films that never really seems to become a reality, remaining trapped in development hell. So when the first trailer dropped, along with the release date, I was excited. Then I watched the trailer. It was… not promising but I tried to remain optimistic.
The film was released on June 12th, straight onto Disney+ due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Within the first five minutes it became abundantly clear that the fears raised by fans at the trailers were well founded.
2020 Disney Enterprises, Inc.
Let’s start with the positives. The depiction of the underground city of Haven where the fairies live is good. It has a nice mixture of technology and grittiness. The sets in general were good, there was lots of panning shots of the countryside which reminded me of the numerous shots of New Zealand that showed up in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies. The cinematography was a definite plus. In addition, the acting was decent. The actor playing Artemis was doing his best with what he had and the actress depicting Captain Holly Short was… trying. They handicapped her role to the point where, much like the depiction of Artemis, it was barely recognizable as the original character and the actress did not have much to work with. The other actors were alright, once again making the best of the bad situation. This film definitely wasn’t bad because it lacked talent.
The main fault (and there were many) was the mess of the plot. A certain amount of changes are expected when it comes to adapting one format to another. Somethings just aren’t going to translate well from page to screen. However, the way the source material was treated in this made me think that the filmmakers flicked through to get some character names and then went at a copy of the book with a chainsaw, converting the few pages that survived. The entire plot was reshaped to fit an incoherent storyline involving a search for a glowing acorn and then the few bits that were recognisable as being from the books were crammed in, leaving a messy film that really didn’t make a lot of sense. I watched it and afterwards, I had no idea what had actually happened. It’s a real shame, as there was a single scene where Artemis and Holly almost resembled their book counterparts and it was the only moment where I was fully interested. If the filmmakers had done the book justice, it looks like it would have been great. If they had taken the plot they made up and had made it into an original film, it could have been decent. But together, they did not work.
2020 Disney Enterprises, Inc.
The characters also suffered from the filmmakers’ chainsaw approach. They were stripped of a great deal of what made them interesting. Artemis went from a calculated morally ambiguous genius to slightly precocious. All of his well thought out plans were gone and while he occasionally mentioned that people were playing into his hands, it looked more like he had everything handed to him. Quite literally, as his father (a character who doesn’t appear until the second film) left him a basement full of answers. Holly also had pretty much everything taken from her, removing her struggles for acceptance in the sexist LEPrecon division and instead giving her a paint by numbers disappeared dad background. She also went from being a determined strong captain to a non-descript officer who really had no personality outside of ‘I WILL CLEAR MY FATHER’S NAME’.
2020 Disney Enterprises, Inc.
Those two were the most clearly altered but basically the whole character list was butchered into pale imitations of themselves. The badass loyal family of bodyguards, Butler and his sister Juliette, who are trained and partnered up for life became generic support characters (especially Juliette who seemed to have been brought in solely so Artemis and Butler didn’t have to make their own sandwiches). Commander Root, the gruff leader of the LEPrecon who is tough as nails and determined to bring out the best in Captain Short, is gender flipped (I don’t know why) and seems to be fairly ineffective. Wisecracking Foley the Centaur, just another tech support character. Opal Koboi, the manic genius pixie (who doesn’t even make an appearance until book two) became a voice on the end of a phone, reduced to blackmail when book Opal would have found a much smarter way to get what she wanted. The only person who seems to have survived the hatchet job relatively intact was Mulch Diggums. He also got a lot more screen time than the original character, probably to facilitate Josh Gad. He might have been slightly toned down but he was one of the few characters that was actually enjoyable to watch… apart from the pointless resizing of his character to make a bunch of tall jokes and the nightmare inducing CGI used on his mouth.
Oh yeah, the CGI was not good. Mulch’s mouth and the troll were the most egregious examples but none of it was great. There’s not much more to say on that.
The whole thing was bad and it was Percy Jackson levels of insulting to the fanbase. Artemis Fowl the book is a unique YA story featuring an interesting lead character, discussions of sexism in the workplace and a great take on an often cliché character type.
Artemis Fowl the movie is none of these things. It’s a bad movie and it’s an even worse adaptation.