Ice Age: Collision Course
3/5 stars
Now playing.
PG. 1h., 34 min.
Directed by Mike Thurmeier and Galen T. Chu.
I’ll admit, I went into Ice Age: Collision Course with excitement and curiosity. I'm a big fan of the first and fourth movies in the franchise (movies two and three? Let’s just say they weren’t my favorites). So for this one, I didn’t really know what to expect. Wait, scratch that — for the 12 dollars ticket, I expected it to be freaking amazing.
After watching it, I say they rename it: Life Lessons 101.
The whole movie starts with my favorite squirrel ever, Scrat, after his beloved acorn. This time, he finds himself in an alien spaceship that he accidentally turns on and launches into space. As he runs about trying to catch that acorn, (at this point will somebody just please help him catch that acorn?) he sends the spaceship flying around in space and hitting planets as he goes. He accidentally hits an asteroid and sends it flying towards earth.
At this point, 20th Century Fox pretty much jammed the movie with life lessons. Let me break it down for you, since each main character had his or her own storyline.
Manny and his family: Manny the mammoth must deal with his daughter, Peaches, impending nuptials with Julian, after which they'll go off exploring. Manny and his wife, Ellie, try everything to convince Peaches to get married and stay home. Julian is a happy-go-lucky, rock-music-loving, clumsy mammoth; Manny worries Julian won’t be able to take care of Peaches… andtaht Peaches no longer needs her father anymore as well.
Diego and Shira: Saber-toothed tigers Diego and Shira want a child but not don't know if they’d be good parents, and fearful that because they're tigers, they're too scary to adopt.
Sid: Sid the ground sloth worries he will never find love. The girl he was dating dumped him after he proposed, leaving him heart broken. As the girl leaves him, she yells “and you look nothing like your profile picture!”, leaving me to wonder why they have online dating in prehistoric life.
Buck and the Dino-birds: Buck the weasel helps a momma triceratops get her egg back after the dino-birds — Gavin, Roger and Gertie — steal it. The dino-birds want revenge against Buck, and they want the asteroid to hit earth so they can be the only creatures around (plausible, I know) but they end up helping Buck and the rest of the herd. In the end, the good guys change the bad guys.
The rest of the herd: The main issue?There is an asteroid threatening to end everything. I won’t give anything away (even though the thing that saved them broke all logic) but everyone had to learn to work together despite any prior differences.
All in all, it was a movie packed with life lessons cloaked in humor and feel-good moments. I was pleasantly surprised with how in-depth it went with issues we can all relate to in one way or another, making this a movie for kids and adults alike.
This article appears in Jul 28 – Aug 4, 2016.