Ice Age: Collision Course

Eventually they would go too far. I watched the animated family comedy adventure movie Ice Age: Collision Course, released on July 22, 2016. Directed by Michael Thurmeier, it takes place during the Ice Age. Starring Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, and Denis Leary, it is rated PG.

As the Herd approaches the wedding of Manny and Ellie’s daughter Peaches to her fiancee Julian, disaster strikes. An asteroid is headed to Earth and could destroy everyone. With the help of their old friend Buck, they need to find a way to save everyone. Can they do it?

I was a big fan of the Ice Age movies as a kid and I still am. The comical yet heartwarming adventures of the found-family herd of animals made for great storytelling. In fact, I’d argue this is one of the best animated kids movie franchises made. It’s right up there with the Toy Story and Shrek movies. The first movie, Ice Age, is the best in the series. It had some surprisingly dark stuff in it, while never going too far for the kids. The second movie, Ice Age: The Meltdown, was more lighthearted by comparison, but it still delivered on a good story. The third movie, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, started to present ridiculous ideas by showing a secret world of dinosaurs, but the storytelling still shined through. The fourth movie, Ice Age: Continental Drift, also got ridiculous with villainous animal pirates and the subplot was cliched, but I think this movie is acceptable enough. My point is, it does feel like every movie got a little worse than its predecessors, but they all had something to enjoy. However, the fifth movie officially jumped the shark and caused a hiatus for this franchise. I never saw it as a kid, and having seen it now, I realize I didn’t miss out. Let’s explore why this movie doesn’t work.

First off, I’ll talk about the story. I mentioned how ridiculous this franchise kept getting. This movie deals with an asteroid going to destroy the Earth. Scrat is in several space scenes to top it off. However, I do think they still could have made this work. The previous two movies did have ridiculous ideas, but I also think they could be fun ideas. Ice Age: The Meltdown already had a metaphorical commentary about global warming, so commentary about the need to protect ourselves from asteroids isn’t a bad idea. The problem is that this movie is bogged down by horrible plotlines. The main plotline revolves around how the mammoths Manny and Ellie have to deal with the fact that Peaches wants to leave the Herd to live alone elsewhere with Julian. This isn’t necessarily a bad idea. In fact, this feels like the next logical step for Manny. Where it goes wrong is that it’s done in a way that makes them look bad. In the previous movie, Manny learned a lesson about not being so overprotective of his daughter. So the fact they had him revert back to that feels lazy. They could have just had it be about how he didn’t want to be separated from her.

This movie is so incredibly cliched. Manny and Ellie resort to trying to convince them not to leave, acting like immature children. In addition, while this is at least in character for Manny, even if it feels lazy, it’s not for the more mature Ellie. The other issue with this plotline is that Julian comes across as a harmless, innocent, and kindhearted guy who just wants Manny’s support. Manny absolutely hates him for no reason at all. This makes him even more unlikable. Sid has a plotline where he finds love with another sloth named Brooke. Again, this isn’t a bad idea. A running gag throughout the series is that Sid is a total failure when it comes to romance. So there was potential here. The failure is that it doesn’t feel earned in the slightest. While Sid is a likable character with zero malicious intent, it’s pretty much his own fault he failed at romance. He could have improved on this in this movie. Instead, he and Brooke just fall in love at first sight. He never changes and she is never put off by any of his bad qualities. The romance itself is so bland. Diego and his wife Shira from the previous movie have a decent idea where they want to have kids, but as sabertooth tigers, kids are scared of them. However, this is only brought up once early on before randomly being brought back once more much later on, with no focus being given to this plotline. There’s another plotline where the villains, a dinosaur family consisting of Gavin, Roger, and Gertie, want to kill Buck. While this isn’t as bad because they’re at least entertaining characters, they don’t come across as that important to the plot. There’s a place called Geotopia, that seems quite mystical and may help them to stop the asteroid. It doesn’t come across as that important and it mainly exists to bring us both Brooke, and maybe the worst Ice Age character, the Shangri Llama. While I do admit the pun is funny and there is some funny comedy with him having everyone do yoga, his voice is grating and he’s quite an unlikable, selfish character. In fact, with all these bad plotlines, only the first one with the mammoths is actually important to the story. I feel like all these other ones exist as filler, as they clearly had no inspiring ideas for this movie. The best part of the movie is unsurprisingly Scrat, as they breathe new life into his acorn gags with it all taking place in space. There are also some funny moments and the animation has clearly improved since the first movie. Overall, this is a story that feels like a waste of time.

I will talk about the characters and voice actors. For all the issues I have with this movie, I feel like every voice actor gave it their all. Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, Denis Leary, Queen Latifah, Keke Palmer, Adam DeVine, Simon Pegg, Seann William Scott, Josh Peck, Jennifer Lopez, Wanda Sykes, Nick Offerman, Max Greenfield, Stephanie Beatriz, and Jessie J voice Manny, Sid, Diego, Ellie, Peaches, Julian, Buck, Crash, Eddie, Shira, Granny, Gavin, Roger, Gertie, and Brooke, respectively. They all seem to do a good job with these voices. I already mentioned their roles in the bad plotlines in the last paragraph. When they’re not involved in that, they can be entertaining. The same cannot be said for Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s performance as the Shangri Llama, due to his grating voice mentioned above. Though to be fair, that probably was how they asked him to voice it. After all, he has been a good actor in projects like the show Modern Family and the movie Cocaine Bear. Neil deGrasse Tyson is in this movie, which sounds like a good idea since he’s the master of astronomical information and has a good presence. They just had to use him in the worst way possible. They had him voice a character called Neil deBuck Weasel. While I at least give credit to the Shangri Llama pun, this pun is insufferably bad. They only called him that because the character exists inside of the head of the weasel Buck. Speaking of which, bringing Buck back was an interesting idea because he is a cool character and I think he added to this mostly cliched movie.

Overall, I hate this movie. It’s not the worst movie I’ve ever seen or even close to it, but it’s just a movie I can’t enjoy. The trailer was misleading, making it look a lot better. With that said though, I do think it is better than the film that followed, The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild. That movie was so uneventful, generic, and bland, that I personally think it was worse. This movie at least tried and was memorable, even if it was a failure. There is scheduled to be another Ice Age movie on February 5, 2027, called Ice Age: Boiling Point. With the time that’s passed, it has the opportunity to be good. Here’s to hoping.

In this movie, they had to stop an asteroid from destroying the Earth. In real life, that is a concern that could lead to human extinction. I’ve already covered some other human extinction concerns. I’ve covered environmental destruction, diseases, and nuclear weapons. So I guess it’s time to cover this. Considering how many asteroids have hit the Earth, you might think asteroids are no concern to us. That is where you would be wrong. Those are harmless asteroids that while maybe not literally harmless, wouldn’t cause more damage than the immediate area of Earth they would hit. But what about asteroids that could do some real damage? The Earth could be destroyed. Even if the result isn’t that bad, it could still have devastating results for human life. However, I say we should not spend our time panicking. There already are people at work for different ways to protect us from asteroids. Still, we can speed up the process. We can keep track of what’s going on in Space to help us be prepared. You can make sure people are talking about this, either from word of mouth or social media. You can also research what an asteroid like this hitting the Earth would be like so you could prepare for the worst case scenario. Most of all, this is a bigger reason to explore space. We can keep track of asteroids that way. We can also try to find new planets for people to habitate. We can find foreign materials that could be used for medicine. We can help keep our planet safe if we all work together on this.