Spark: A Space Tail (2017)

Powerful

Just perfect...

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

There have been many animated movies that have been set in space. Some are done well that they are remembered for years to come, others are done badly that they are quickly forgotten. "Spark", however, is a movie so bad that it belongs in a $5 DVD barrel, near the bottom in fact. If you've never heard of this movie before, good. I'm glad that you don't know about it, because it's horrible. Honestly, it's one of the worst animated movies I have ever seen in my entire life. I'll explain why right now why this movie is absolutely terrible.The evil General Zhong (Alan C. Peterson) has taken over the planet the planet of Bana and has sucked up the planets inhabitants into a mysterious black hole made by a creature called the Kracken who has also broken up the planet into several shards. Thirteen years have past since then and three of the survivors named Spark (Jace Norman), Vix (Jessica Biel) and Chunk (Rob deLeeuw) have been living on underground on a garbage shard in secret with the latter two of the survivors participating in secret missions trying to overthrow the evil general. Spark, however, is left alone on the shard and wants to leave it to find his parents. After intercepting an e-mail from the Queen of Bana (Hillary Swank) asking Vix to go on a mission, Spark decides to steal the space ship on the shards to participate in an "epic space mission". What follows is a film filled with many plot holes, clichéd story lines, and elements stolen from better movies resulting in an epic disaster.I haven't hated an animated movie so much since I saw last years abysmal "Norm of the North" and while it's slightly better than that film, it still really left me feeling very angry and disgusted. From what I found out, this movie apparently cost nearly forty million dollars to make which absolutely appalled me. I can easily tell that the movies budget went into getting the Oscar winning actors that appear in the movie including Susan Sarandon, Hillary Swank, and even Patrick Stuart. The reason I say this is because the animation of this movie is inexcusably bad. It looked like it was made by a student who is just starting to use computer animation as the whole film looked like some overly cartoony video game. The story was also pretty painful. The film rips off elements that have been done better in other movies including the evil uncle from "Lion King", the elements of the force and laser swords from "Star Wars", the robot designs from "Terminator" and also the slow motion elements from "The Matrix". It was pretty painful seeing these elements done terribly. As for the characters, they're pretty forgettable and  boring. They don't do anything interesting and have nothing standing out about them. I also really hated there names. Hearing these names made me think that they were create by a first grader. Then again, if you told me this movie was written by a first grader, I'd believe that. The only element that was slightly enjoyable was the voice acting. The actors at least tried with what they were given, but I am frustrated that they signed on to do this movie."Spark" is one of the worst animated movies I've seen in a very long time. It was so unoriginal, confusing as well as being very boring that it really angered me. I don't know what else to say, just don't watch it.  Don't even show your kids this disaster. My only advice is to skip this movie entirely and never watch it whatsoever. You'll live a happier life if you don't watch it.

1. Animation quality is poor, foreground action was plastic looking; background was static and flat. 2. Another example of famous actors doing voice overs that don't match the character and sound Hollywood artificial. About emotionally real as daytime game show prompted atmosphere. 3. Simplistic and predictable dialogue at a 4th grade level. 4. Really bad science and a poor way to introduce anyone to science. A mix of human, animal and bizarre made-up characters on a CGI planet that looked more like plastic than anything natural and alive. Planet breaks apart from a cyclone black hole only to emerge out of it as livable fragments. Sorry, would not even pass 6th grade science. 5. Usual plot of bad sibling wants to rule whatever is left of planet. 6. Rarely do you see IMDb give a rating below 5; this one met that rarity.

It's hard to believe that so many people made this film and yet nobody asked the question "Why cares about this story?".I don't like having to work too hard trying to figure out the plot or what motivates the characters into action, but after ten minutes I was still asking myself "what's the point of this movie?".For me the animation was fine. Had the story been a good one then I wouldn't care about how realistic the characters are portrayed - it's a kid's animation so I don't expect it to look lifelike.But I did wonder about the language. I don't think my 4, 7 and 9 year old kids know what "flailing" means, together with a script and story that seemed a little beyond their reach. Having said that, they all sat and watched the film, happily eating their popcorn and apples and said they enjoyed it. So what do parents know?

Not the best animated feature I ever seen. I feel sorry for some of the stars in the movie like Jessica Biel, Susan Sarandon, Hilary Swank and Patrick Stewart who picked the wrong animated feature to voice. Possibly thought it was going to be a hit cause it was an animated feature.The animation is very mediocre. Feels like there they created a program for generic computer animation that can spit out animation films that all look the same and Spark decided to use this instead of animators. Most importantly, the story was lame. I've seen the story a million times. One could point out that if you look at this hard enough you can see the same story as the Lion King in Spark, but that's not the point. Spark's vision to add their own twist to this story fell very short of being decent.Wanted to like it but didn't happen.http://cinemagardens.com