Lhikan Lives On

He didn't write the script for TLR. But he did approve it. He didn't? Whoops. ~Johnuva Technically, he did. He wrote the story, Sean Derek did the scripts. SERIOUSLY? TLR's script was approved by Greg? How? Did Sean Derek slip something in his drink? Was it an earlier draft that was approved, as opposed to the final draft? TLR's story was great, yes, but its execution in the movie was undeniably awful. We had a great trend going: MoL was good, LoMN was great, WoS was awesome, and now TLR tripped over itself more times than I can count. The dialogue was somewhat-tolerable as it was written, but the voice acting destroyed it. Every joke fell flat, every dramatic pronouncement felt predictable, and every meaningful line lacked oomph. On top of that, there was the soundtrack and sound effects; gone are Nathan Furst's sweepingly majestic tracks and fitting leitmotifs, replaced by wholly forgettable cliche cartoon background tunes, and the sound effects were all pulled from a massive bin labeled "stock cartoon sound effects". And, just to rub further salt in the wound, the animation quality was inconsistent: characters were rendered beautifully, I'll admit, (though they looked more robotic than the previous film characters, despite the little detail about them being supposedly mostly organic) but objects had a sparkly-clean look that produced a rather jarring contrast, though the contrast was not nearly as stark as the contrast between the beautifully animated characters and the third-rate-PS2-launch-title backgrounds and environments. On top of that, the characters lost their beautiful rendering during fight sequences, which ended up looking less like actual characters fighting and more like mere toys pitted against one another. The film seems to be trying to be a Disney animated comedy (complete with cartoonish slapstick), which really strikes a painful contrast with the tone of every other piece of BIONICLE canon we've been presented with since 2001. Give the films back to Miramax. They seemed to be trying their best to prove that "direct-to-DVD" doesn't mean the same thing as "shovelware". Tinseltown Toons seemed to be actively trying to take a great story and destroy it. EDIT: Yes, I did purchase TLR before watching it.

Mata/Nuva 01-03 FTW!!!! Actually, while I REALLY liked the Mata Nui storyline arc, I have to say my very favorite story arc was 04-05. HELLO, METRU NUI! I always wanted to loud-shout that.