The Lorax

WARNING: This review is hidden because it reveals the content of the film.
Click here to show this review. Hello, I'm the Nostalgia Kid, I Remember It Because Nobody Else Does! Today I will be reviewing The Lorax! Remember back on my old account when I gave it 7 stars out of 10? Well, I had to see the movie again. My teacher at school read us the book and then we were forced to watch the movie. I found out something shocking, people LIKED the movie! They thought it was GOOD! I thought that maybe this was a one time thing, after all, all the people who liked it were girls and they also like Twilight, so I took this with a grain of salt. However, I was wrong, one YouTuber said that she thought it was one of the BEST FILMS of 2012 and that it needed a nomination for BEST ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK!!! Now, either it was a slow year, or that chick is just really stupid. Keep in mind that she didn't like Cars or Brave, 2 of MY favorite movies! She also liked other crappy movies like Hotel Transylvania and Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return! Come on, The Lorax is WAY worse than those movies, or just good in general! As I went on, more and more people said that they liked The Lorax, I eventually couldn't take it anymore! I took away half a star, now it gets 5 stars out of 10!!! Now, keep in mind that these are just opinions, if you like The Lorax, fine. I can't control what you like and don't like, but please read this to see why it doesn't deserve to be one of the BEST MOVIES of 2012!!! Now let's get started, shall we? Now the first few minutes of the movie are perfect, with the Lorax introducing the story. It's just when that intro stops when the movie starts to get bad. The opening was a song! A bad song, with a couple clever lyrics, but it was just SO CHEESY! When I first saw that, I was thinking, man, if this is a musical, and all the songs are as bad as this, I'm in for some big trouble! But I was wrong. The other songs aren't as bad as the opening, they are even worse! The opening is probably the best one! But, I'll get to that later. Now, in the opening, we learn about Thneedville, a town where everything is artificial. We meet our main character, a little boy voiced by Zac Efron (GROAN!) And he is in love with a teenage girl named Audrey, voiced by Taylor Swift (GROAN!) Audrey wants to see a real tree more than anything. How she knows what a tree is or why she wants to see one, I dunno. It's never explained! Anyway, the little boy is determined to get her a tree so he can be Audrey's boyfriend! Now, this leads me to my biggest problem with the movie, the kid doesn't want a tree because he is concerned with the environment, he wants a tree to get a girl that's way too old for him! What kind of an attitude is that!? Now, you could argue that the boy learns later on that trees are good for more reasons than getting girls, but even that fails horribly! But, I'll get to that later. Before I fully get back to the story, I have a little nitpick. When the boy asks his granny where to find a tree, granny tells the boy where to find the Once-Ler. While that sounds all find and dandy, there if just one line that drives me nuts," At the far edge of town, where the grass never grows," . What!? What was in the book was fine!"At the far edge of town, where the grickle grass grows," ! What's wrong with that!? Why did you change that!? Anyway, that's just a nitpick, back to the story! Now, the boy starts to go out of town, where an evil corporation that sells clean air called O'hare Air doesn't want people to go out of town. Why? I don't know. It's just a weak bottled water commentary. If this was handelled well, like the BnL corporation from WALL-E, it could've been a really clever environmental and social commentary, but it isn't. While WALL-E portrays it's corporation as irresponsible, The Lorax portrays it's corporation as flat-out evil! That's pretty lazy! That's the kind of villain I would put into one of my Brother Nature comics from second grade! That's right movie, your villains are on-par with villains from a comic written by a 7 year old! Anyway, once we get passed that, we see the world, a dark and depressing place, but, this asks the question, are there really NO OTHER trees in the world!? The Truffula Tree is extinct, but aren't there other kinds if trees in the world? And another thing, is Thneedville really the only city in the world? Aren't there other cities that they can interact with? And another thing, if the world is all polluted, where is O'hare Air getting it's clean air from? And ANOTHER thing, how can a city be run by a corporation? Where's the mayor? Where's the president? Normally, we wouldn't question these things if it were in a short little kids book, like The Lorax, and a book like The Lorax is just so smartly written, you just wouldn't question those things because it's not the kind of story that relies on a lot of logic. It's Dr. Seuss for crying out loud! However, In a movie, it's an entirely different story, you need to explain these things, or else there will be plot holes. Now there are a few movies that we don't question for logic, like Where The Wild Things Are and The Wizard Of Oz, but that's because those movies distract us from these logical flaws with clever writing, but in The Lorax, the writing isn't very clever, so there isn't anything to distract us from those logic flaws. Anyway, I'm getting off topic, back to the story! So the boy finds the Once-Ler, and the Once-Ler says that he is the one who wrecked everything, and it goes into a flashback sequence that seems like an entirely different movie, but it works well, except for a couple of things, for one thing, the Once-Ler has a face in the flashback sequence. That's just a nitpick, though, I guess it would be pretty hard to hide his face all the time like in the book in a CG animated movie. The second problem is the Once-Ler's hillbilly family. They are annoying, hateable, and pointless! The only purpose they serve is to make the Once-Ler more of an underdog and to make the audience feel bad for him more. It fails horribly, though. The third problem is the forest animals. I'm sorry, but the Bar-Ba-Loots, the Swammee Swans, and the Humming Fish are just pointless comic relief! They can be cute at times, but they are just rip-offs of the Minions from Despicable Me, who were rip-offs of the Pizza Planet Aliens from Toy Story and the Rabbids from the video games to begin with! The forest animals are also the cause for another awful song! Why did you give the Once-Ler a guitar!? Another problem the flashback has is the Lorax himself. He seems to be more concerned with what that Once-Ler is GOING to do than what he actually IS doing. So what, he cut down ONE TREE to make a Thneed, and the Once-Ler saw that the animals didn't like it very much, so he stopped! He only cut down more because his hillbilly family made him do it! Blame it all on them! However, even after the Once-Ler promises to never cut down more trees, the Lorax keeps on nagging and nagging the Once-Ler to not cut down trees! There's another awful song about it, by the way. What's a Thneed you may ask? Hard to explain. The movie doesn't explain it well, just read the book and you'll understand. It's supposed to symbolize that useless item that no one really needs and ruins the environment, like the PS4 or the iPhone 5S. Anyway, the Lorax is just not a likeable character, he tries to kill the Once-Ler for gods sake! He only saved him because one of the Bar-Ba-Loots was on the bed, and it was about to go over a waterfall! Dude! What would Dr. Seuss think? The Lorax, everybody! Attempted murderer! Anyway, another problem is that the destruction of the forest only takes a couple of minutes, and it plays along to THE WORST SONG in the ENTIRE MOVIE! I'm sorry, How Bad Can I Be is an awful song! It's kinda like that awkward feeling you get when your parents try to be all "hip" and "gangsta" when your friends are over. Anyway, what made the book so powerful is that the destruction of the forest took up a large portion of the story, here, it's only a couple minutes. Also, in the book, the critters left the forest one by one, species by species. But in this, they all leave all at once. It's not very powerful that way. Anyway, that concludes the flashback and the Once-Ler gives the boy a Truffula seed to plant. This leads us to our climax. They all need to get the seed to the centre of town to plant it. But, the chase scene between the O'hare Air henchman and the boy just isn't exciting. Mostly because there is nothing at stake! The seed isn't going to explode if you don't get it to the centre of town right that instant, so why bother? I guess you could argue that the boy is at stake because if he doesn't give O'hare Air the seed, they said that they would do something bad to him, but honestly, what are they going to do to him? Think about it! You see, in WALL-E, there is a chase where EVE and WALL-E have to get the plant to the centre of the Axium to get it back to earth before the other, evil robots can destroy the plant. Sound familiar? Now, what is at stake here isn't the plant or the earth, I mean, they aren't going to explode if you don't get there right that instant, but what is at stake is WALL-E himself. His circuitry is ruined and the pieces that they need to fix him are in WALL-E's house on earth! This is as conflict that The Lorax doesn't have. Anyway, when they get to the centre of town, Mr. O'hare tries to convince people that trees are bad, and this leads us to our moral, is it trees are good because they make life? No. Is it trees are good because they are homes for animals? Nope. Get this, the moral of the story is," Trees are good because air should be free!" WTF!?!?!? What kind of a moral is that!?!? They could've made it about sustainability and how you shoud use natural resources sparingly, and how you are just repeating history, but nope. The moral is," Air should be free!" Anyway, we get another awful song that is pretty annoying because you could tell that the songwriters thought that they were just writing the best darn song ever written, but it isn't!!! Oh, and you get this little dandy from Mr. O'hare," Let it die, let it die, let it shrivel up and die!" Umm, okay, I have 2 things to say about that line. One is, yeah! This guy gets it! That's what I have to say about this movie! Let it die, let it die, let it shrivel up and die! My second thing goes back to my original problem with the villain, he's straight up evil, but, get this, this movie hates corporations, right? Well, this movie is tied in to SO MANY corporations, that the movie seems hypocritical. Seriously, there is a car commercial with The Lorax. Yeah, a gas guzzling car tied in to an environmental movie! But it gets worse, the commercial says that the car is "Truffula Tree Friendly" Umm, what the heck does that mean!? Truffula Trees aren't real! It's a GAS GUZLING CAR!!! Dude, why?!?!?!? That is wrong on so many levels! Anyway, after the song, it's a flash forward to the world filled with life and, guess what, you see the Once-Ler's face again! The Lorax also returns and it's happily ever after! I have a problem with this, the problem is that the book was so powerful because you don't know what happens next. You don't know if the forest ever grows again or if the Lorax comes back, it's all up to you to decide. But, the movie isn't very powerful because it lets you know what happens next. And you see the Once-Ler's face again!!! Anyway, that's The Lorax for you! How is it overall, well, the main characters are pretty one-dimensional and underdeveloped, mostly because we don't spend enough time to get to know them. The songs are memorable, but only because they are so awful that it's hard to forget them. It's obvious that the songs were just filler so the movie could be 90 minutes long and go into theatres. The movie's environmental message is really botched, and a lot of the commentary is pretty weak. However, with all that said, the movie isn't TERRIBLE, it has some nice animation, the few clever commentaries that the movie has are really clever, the forest animals are pretty cute, but the movie just isn't very good. If you are looking for a great, heartwarming environmental movie with the most clever writing and commentary ever, this isn't what you're looking for. Just read the book or watch WALL-E if you want that. But, if you are looking for a cute, kids movie that has nothing much to it, this is what you're looking for. I kinda understand why people like it, it's just not for me. What are your thoughts? How Ba-a-ad did you think this movie was? Do you have any other thoughts to bring up? Tell me in a reply! I'm The Nostalgia Kid, I remember it because nobody else does! [.,..]