LastingAware
The greatest movie ever!
StunnaKrypto
Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.
WillSushyMedia
This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.
Juana
what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.
Animated Antic
Disney is a company that always manages to release great animated movies. Both Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar are two of the biggest and best animation studios to exist and have put out gems that will last for years to come. With that said though, Disney has released an animated stinker every once in a while. Not every studio is perfect and every company is prone to release a bad movie every now and then and "Planes" is without a doubt, a bad movie. This film is a spinoff to Pixar's successful "Cars" franchise although it's not made by Pixar but rather another lesser known animation studio at Disney and it's obviously a cash grab. How do I know this? Well, the film was initially meant to go straight to DVD, but the executives at the company must have seen dollar signs in their eyes and wanting to squeeze some more money out of parents pockets, decided to release it on the big screen. Big mistake. This film is easily one of the worst animated movies that's been released under the Disney banner in a long time and that's saying a lot given the good movies they've put out recently.A crop-duster named Dusty (Dane Cook) dreams of being a racer. Having been bored of flying in straight lines over fields constantly, he flies to Lincoln, Nebraska with his friends, a fuel truck named Chug (Brad Garret) and a forklift named Dottie (Teri Hatcher), to enter the Wings Across the Globe race and manages to qualify. Hoping to get some training for the big race, he enlists the help of an old fighter plane named Skipper Riley (Stacy Keach) and manages to get Dusty to improve over time except for achieving a fear of heights he has. Yeah, a plane has a fear of heights and the excuse for why he has it is because he never flew over 1000 feet before. Give me a break. Anyway, will Dusty manage to win the race and conquer his fear of heights? Should this movie have stayed being made for DVD and not have been released in theaters? I think you know the answers to both questions.The story for this movie is so predictable and lazy that it might have been written by a script generator. You've seen the story a million times. The dreamer who is doubted by everyone takes on a challenge and comes out on top. It's nothing new. It goes everywhere you think it goes and hits every single point you think it will hit. There's high points and low points. There's conflicts and dramas. There's attempts at comedy that all fall flat on their face. Yeah, I should talk about that as well. This comedy is dreadful. Not one joke and I mean one joke made me laugh. They mostly consist of unfunny puns and juvenile gags that maybe a five year old will laugh at, but will make everyone else roll their eyes. The animation has some good things in it, but not a lot. For something intending to go direct to DVD, the backgrounds look great. They look very photorealistic, are beautifully rendered and are simply wonderful to look at. Just wish the characters looked as good. They looked amateur at best. Fine for a straight to DVD movie, but pretty lame for a film released in theaters. At least Pixar gave some details and scratches to the characters in the "Cars" films. Here they looked like a toy that came fresh out of the box. There's a reason why movies have keen details. The characters are just the clichéd characters you expect to see in the movie. Dusty is the dreamer with the heart, Skipper is the old mentor with a past, Chug is the silly best friend, and Dottie is the sensible friend. It's just a checklist now that has every single character trait possible. However, there are other things that frustrated about the movie. The cinematography was a joke as it was constant zooms and characters always being mostly centered. The editing was rushed and made the film kind of hard to follow at times. And I really have to ask, why did most of the cast accept this movie? I mean apart from the ones I mentioned, other actors include Cedric the Entertainer, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Roger Craig Smith, Gabriel Iglesias, John Cleese, and Val Kilmer. Seriously, with a cast like that, I expect a lot better. I'll just say that these aforementioned actors (along with Brad Garret) have been in better animated movies and I suggest watching the other ones they were in than this."Planes" is just a lame movie only made to make money. The story is predictable and lazy, the animation looks amateur at best, and the characters are so generic and have actors that are far better than this movie deserves. There are far better movies out there that have the word "plane" in the title and I suggest you avoid this wrong flight and look at them instead.
datautisticgamer-74853
So far, this (spoiler alert!) is the only 1 I would give to a "Disney" movie, and even then, I'm just being generous for the animation, which for DisneyToon standards is watchable. But considering how the rest of the film is the most tediously insufferable I've ever seen, the animation works against it. The story is far from innovative and is executed in the most predictable way possible, and right away, you will want to assume that Dusty wins the race (which ACTUALLY happens, as if DisneyToon wants to appeal to under 2-year-olds). The characters virtually never take a break from speaking or doing something else, and plenty of the foreign planes (come to think of it, how are cars and planes, and presumably everything else, constructed in this world anyway?) are just stereotypical. The jokes are closer to cringeworthy than not hilarious, including an oil sight gag that is supposed to substitute for fecal matter. And speaking of that, 2013 happened to be among the worst years for modern animation, alongside 2006. DisneyToon, we didn't need you throwing more on top of that biohazardous, malodorous pile. How disappointed are we at John Lasseter for even green lighting this? Plenty, as this is a film that should be avoided at all costs. It's just another shameless cash grab under Disney's flag to sell more RC planes and such, but offering none of the possible appeal of Cars.
ofpsmith
I didn't go into the theater expecting a whole lot. It looked to me as if it was jut going to be a Cars spin off. And guess what? I was totally right. All Disney did here was put the face on another machine and make a kids film out of it. Notice I said Disney instead of Pixar. Pixar was not behind this film, it was Disney by themselves. Also keep in mind that I love cars and it's sequel. This was just a knock off of Cars. Well how is the film itself? Not great. It's not really a bad film, but to be fair I can't really call it a good film either. It's just kind of bland. A crop duster named Dusty Crophopper (Dane Cook) is an ordinary Joe Schmoe who dreams of being the best. So he settles on plane racing. Dusty finds a mentor in Skipper Riley (Stacy Keach) an old F4U Corsair to get him ready for the race. And then the big race comes, and it's the underdog story with a greedy co-competitor as our antagonist and all that. That's pretty much the film for you. Overall this was just really bland. The story never really had much interest in it for me and parts of it were just kind of long and drawn out. The most forgettable character was the villain which is that greedy race plane I mentioned earlier. When the villain is the least memorable character, that's a bad sign. I don't know if people like this guy or not, but I don't remember much of anything about him. I don't even remember his name or anything that he did. Keep in mind I haven't seen it in a long time, but still. I should be able to remember at least something about a film's villain, and with this guy I just really don't. I can't really recommend it a whole lot so I'll just end by saying, see Cars instead.
rking-19
Summer Disney animation features, such a dream for parents who want to give their antsy kids something different to do while protecting them from bad influences, what could be wrong with them? Plenty, if you don't want them to be messed up for life. Consider the attempted retread (re- wing?) movie Planes.Some have compared this movie to the Pixar movie from which it is derived. What makes this movie completely different from progenitor Cars is that the former movie demonstrated the fulfillment of a heart turned towards home, community and the fulfillment of one's designed purpose, and Planes is a siren song for pursuing the fake shallow validation of glamorous fame even if in the process one destroys the good and beautiful things designed into him/her.You probably already know the basics of the movie: small-town guy with goofy best friend dreams of something not in the normal realm of possibility for him, and with help from a broken, dysfunctional mentor and supportive friends (even supportive opponents), goes on to do the impossible.With everyone harping on the animation and character quality -- not without reason -- it is surprising that the underlying philosophy of Planes has not been more readily identified. Perhaps we should take more care to examine the genetically-modified processed-box-food viewpoints being fed to our kids with these movies. In Planes alone there are several ranging from nuisance to ones guaranteed to groom your children for misery in adulthood.For instance, the mentor deceives the main character about his past, and his lying is literally justified later in the movie. Basically the teaching is: it is okay to lie, otherwise the outcome might not have been what I or you want. (If I had not said X, would you have done Y? ... I guess not, so all is well.) Is that really the moral outlook you wish to impart to your loved ones? The movie had an opportunity to show how one (or both characters in this case) can misinterpret the past, and it is a lesson they should have learned rather than covering it over by justifying deception.Another small issue is the presentation that females are either ambitiously unethical players or frivolous romantics without depth. I do not want my son seeing women that way, do you? There's the "war on women" right there.In the prior generation of Disney movies, parents were portrayed as the bad guys, and needed to be "put right" by the children. As that has gotten old, especially since some watching those movies now have kids of their own and realize how ridiculous that perspective is, Disney has now turned to making the mentors always emotionally messed up and who need healing and teaching from their "youngers". Wellllll, I guess that could be considered an improvement since the young ones learn something too. But better would be that the mentors sometimes are just good mentors!The most prominent and damaging, though, is the ultimate lesson of the movie: be unhappy with who you are and prefer glamor, fame, and "flights of fancy" to wholesomeness. The even-worse corollary is that you are somehow defective -- something is wrong with the essence of who you were made to be -- and must be "corrected" to be good. (You might not have noticed the support for trans-gender surgery; notice the symbolic castration of the main character when he is "modified" and how that makes him better at being something he was not designed to be.) All children (even unwanted ones) were originally built for unique and important purposes. What is going to happen to the young kids of today who grow up and learn to eschew their own wonderful essence for some foolish or meaningless quest? Those empty pursuits will end up substituting for deep and important real quests for truth and meaning that should be part of their journey.Parents, please beware that movie-makers can be more like drop-out moralizers than world-class philosophers, and you cannot trust movies to give your children a world-view they will be successful and fulfilled with. If you let your kids go to this movie, discuss with them the killer flaws hidden within the contrails of the story.