Thru the Moebius Strip

USA / USA • 2005 • 87m •

• Directed by: Glenn Chaika. • Starring: Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Chris Marquette, Mark Hamill, Michael Dorn, Andrea Leon, Peri Gilpin, Kellie Martin, Daniel Davis, Dee Bradley Baker, John DeMita, Kevin McDonald, Jim Romanovich, Steve Blum. • Music by: Nathan Lanier, Olivier Lliboutry.

Physicist Simon Weir invents a portal that can in theory take people to unimaginably distant locations millions of light years away. He tests the portal and never returns. Everyone believe he's dead and the portal is forgotten. His son Jac however does not believe this. When he's 14, he finds his father's portal and decides to go after his dad. He emerges on a strange alien planet of giants, who follow a code of honor similar to Earth's medieval chivalry. Jac meets some friendly locals and finds out that his father is still alive, but imprisoned. The aliens make no distinction between technology and magic, so Jac plans to use this to rescue his dad. What he doesn't realize is that stakes are much hire than that.

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2:12

Review:

Image from: Thru the Moebius Strip (2005)

In some ways this is a combination between Epic, itself a 3D animation movie about entering a feudal fantasy world that is of a different size than our own, and Star Wars, from where a lot of the ideas were blatantly appropriated. I could criticize a lot of things about the film, but I won't. The bottom line is that I actually enjoyed most of it. What does it harm is actually the animation.

You may have seen other comments of mine where I dismiss the importance of animation style if the artistic vision is good enough. But with such a cliché plot and with a designer such a Moebius, anyone would expect a lot more from this film. As such, it becomes a barely average family movie, an attempt to copy the success of American animation films. You may think "why not? Americans remake everything they see making money in other countries.", but it works for them. Europeans want substance, are used to interesting stories and have no idea what PG-13 means. And you know the story of the copy of the copy of the copy, after all.

Conclusion: for a story about a teen from the future going through a portal to an alien planet to look for his father and falling into a feudal intrigue between two factions of giants, the film was ridiculously mild. I half expected them to burst into song at the end of the film. The 3D animation is caught between interesting world design and really shoddy technical implementation, but it's mostly bad and uninspiring. The result is average at most and truly not a 7, but just a bit more than 6, which for me is a failure.

Review by siderite from the Internet Movie Database.

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