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Artemis Fowl is one of my absolute favourite books, second only to A Villain's Night Out by Margaret Mahy. I've been waiting for a film adaptation ever since I first read it in 2004, when I was fifteen, so imagine how excited I was when I heard that one was finally on the way. I was a tad sceptical that Disney was in charge of it, but I remained hopeful even through the numerous delays that ended up pushing it back almost a full year. However, that optimism was almost completely crushed when the trailer was released. I didn't watch it myself because I generally try to avoid trailers, but the reactions were almost universally negative. That public reaction persisted when the film itself was finally released, so I was not very enthusiastic going into this movie.
Having now seen it… Well, I'm not going to sugarcoat this. It's terrible! Even all that bad press could not have prepared me for this! You can probably guess that there's a ton from the book that they got wrong, but that statement just doesn't cover it. They got just about everything wrong; it's as though, at every turn, they were going out of their way to piss fans off! This is a top contender for the worst adaptation I've ever seen!
Now, for those who haven't read the books (or seen this movie, for that matter), I might have some minor spoilers, so you have been warned. If you haven't read them, definitely do so. :-) There are eight in the series, but for me, it's a no-brainer: the first one is the best.
So just how badly did this movie misrepresent it?
Right from the start, the main thing the creators botched is the character of Artemis Fowl himself. In his very first scene, he's shown surfing, and Mulch Diggums (who serves as the narrator in a nonsensical bookend) tells us he loves everything about his home, implying that he has a very cheery, carefree attitude. That is the antithesis of the book version of the character! While Artemis does become more compassionate as the series progresses, he started out as a cynical academic type who spent nearly all of his time on the computer. To directly quote from the book, "Long hours indoors in front of the monitor had bleached the glow from his skin." Also, more importantly, he was fully aware of his family's criminal activity and determined to keep their name alive and infamous. That's why he devised the plan to kidnap a fairy: to restore his family's fortune. Was Disney really so afraid that a protagonist who was an antihero or a villain wouldn't sell? The legions of fans of the books prove that's not the case! That's why the Disney name being attached to an adaptation of this book was our first sign that something was wrong. In fact, the book's epilogue says, "There is a tendency to romanticise Artemis, to attribute to him qualities that he does not possess," and ironically, that's exactly the trap into which Disney fell headlong!
They woefully downplayed his intelligence, too. In the book, he discovered the existence of the fairies himself and devised the plan to exploit them all on his own. One of my favourite scenes is his efforts to translate the Fairy Book (which is basically their bible and, of course, completely left out of the movie). But in the film, his father is the one who finds out about them and has pretty much done all the work for him. Essentially, they took a zealous criminal mastermind and turned him into the most passive character imaginable. And yet, at the end, they still have Artemis proclaim himself a criminal mastermind despite never having him do anything to support that claim.
But it's not just Artemis. The entire story ends up butchered here. They tried to include almost every key scene from the book, like the troll attack in Italy and all the important beats of the siege of Fowl Manor, but in all cases, they completely changed the motivating circumstances. For example, in the book, Holly's reason for visiting Ireland, which ultimately leads to her capture, is to perform the Ritual to restore her magic, but in the film, she's breaking ranks to "clear her father's name" for some initially ill-defined reason.
Speaking of which, Artemis's goal in this movie is to rescue his father, and his reason for intercepting Holly (after a continuity error where he's inexplicably accompanying Butler on site, I might add) is just to prove his father's claim that fairies are real. So, after nothing but wide-eyed fascination up to that point, his treating her as a prisoner later is straight-up contradictory. But then they bond after one scene where they talk about their fathers, and suddenly they're best friends by the end. They become friends in the books, yes, but not until much later in the series. All through the first book, their relationship is nothing more than captor and captive because, like I said before, that was the core of Artemis's plan all along. He took no pleasure in keeping her prisoner; he just saw it as a necessary evil.
Now let's list a few more examples of minor changes that rubbed me the wrong way. For one thing, in the book, Artemis's mother wasn't dead; she had a prominent role! For another, I'll never get their decision to call Butler by his full name. In the books, a Butler bodyguard never reveals their first name to their employer unless they're sure they're about to die, which (spoiler alert) very nearly happens in book three. Nor do I understand why they made Mulch Diggums a human-sized giant dwarf, especially since they made the fairies in general much taller than they were in the book anyway; Holly is described as exactly a metre high, a centimetre below the fairy average.
In fact, the scene that comes closest by far to resembling its book original is Mulch's clash with the goblins in his prison cell. While we're on the subject, interestingly, there are a couple of elements from the second book worked into this movie as well, like Artemis's session with the school counsellor and the whole plot of trying to rescue his father, plus an allusion to Opal Koboi's partnership with Briar Cudgeon.
And then, on top of all the scenes that they warped beyond recognition, they also added a plot device that didn't exist at all in the books: something called the Aculos. It is a textbook example of a MacGuffin: an all-powerful artefact that all the characters are trying to obtain, whose exact function is kept vague. Not only is it as mundane as you can get, but what's infuriating is how the entire plot is rewritten to hinge around this MacGuffin. It's what the father's kidnapper is after, so it's also Artemis's end goal, and it's at the centre of Holly's back-story and her disgraced father. It's even the altered subject of Mulch's safecracking scene.
You want to know the moment that angered me the most? It was the words that Holly uses to activate the Aculos, which is the first paragraph of the Fairy Book. The cheap exploitation of those words from the novel pushed my hot button so hard that I actually said out loud, "Oh, fuck you!"
Now, so far, all I've talked about is what disappointed me as a fan of the book. But, even if you take the adaptation angle out of the equation and just look at it as a film on its own, it's still awful! And the main reason for that is the pacing. It ceaselessly rushes from one scene to another, and the scenes themselves are so hurried that the film barely gives itself, or the audience, a second to breathe. Therefore, every scene is left almost completely devoid of passion or emotion. Or maybe that's just because the only emotion I ever felt was anger at how they were disrespecting the source material!
The special effects are… not the worst I've ever seen, but still far from impressive. Except for Foaly the centaur: the blend between the actor and his horse body is pretty seamless. But the CGI reaches its nadir when the troll attacks Fowl Manor; that entire sequence looks so fake that I had my head in my hands from the first frame.
That's about all I have to say. I hate this movie. I wouldn't recommend it to either fans of the books or newcomers. I think the only thing keeping me from giving it a score of 1/10 is just how much my expectations had been lowered, so I'm not really angry so much as just depressed that the movie turned out the way it did.
Final words: I hope this travesty doesn't discourage people from attempting further adaptations in the future. Maybe, at some point down the road, we'll get a movie that respects the books and understands what made them so popular. There's still hope for Artemis Fowl to be done justice.
My rating: 20%
