Against the wishes of her town elders, a rebellious teen sets off on a journey to discover why her world is dying.
Genre: Feature Film-Action/Adventure
Rating: PG13
Release Date: 7-SEP-2004
Media Type: DVDOriginally a computer-generated, animated feature presented in 3-D, the French-American Kaena: The Prophecy still looks eye-poppingly spectacular in a regular, two-dimensional format. The post-apocalyptic tale concerns an adventurous young woman, Kaena (voiced in English by Kirsten Dunst), who is a member of a race–one of many–that inhabit an enormous tree called the Axis, rising 100 miles from Earth’s surface. While her people’s leader, Opaz (Richard Harris), insists his tribe’s sole purpose is collecting sap and honoring the gods who provide sustenance, Kaena is more interested in exploring. Signs that the Axis might be dying sends Kaena on a mission to find out why; along the way she encounters a slavemaster race, the Selenites, and their vicious queen (Anjelica Huston). Fantastic to look at, Kaena: The Prophecy is graphically dense, constantly moving, and truly inventive when it comes to designing creatures that appear equal parts vegetable and animal. –Tom Keogh
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April 17, 2010
#1
For what it’s worth it was a pretty good movie. Entertaining. Not as good as Final Fantasy but still good.
The only MAJOR problem I had was that the tree connected to two planets did not make sense. There is a point in the middle of the tree where the gravitaional pull of both planets cancel each other out (which means no gravity and you float). But if the tree is connecting 2 planets, where is the gratational pull coming from. Planets spin. So the tree would be scraping or anything else than remaining in one spot. I know it’s a movie and one should suspend their belief and enjoy it. Fine but someone should have at least noticed this BEFORE they decided to make the movie.
April 17, 2010
#2
Seeing as how “Final Fantasy” wasn’t a big moneymaker, I was glad to learn that Columbia/Tri-Star was still willing to release another CGI feature that wasn’t aimed directly at small children. I was also surprised to learn that the film was French, but shouldn’t have been after viewing it as “Kaena: The Prophecy” makes little sense to its audience.
The film, directed by Chris Delaporte and Pascal Pinon who originally wanted to make a video game, opens promisingly with the spectacular crash landing of a space ship. The camera sweeps through the various levels of the ship, showing the passengers running for their lives as it explodes. The film loses steam afterwards, as if the filmmakers put all their effort in the first few minutes in order to fool the audiences into thinking they hadn’t wasted their money. The story concerns the young girl Kaena (voiced by Kirsten Dunst) who is a member of group who spends their days collecting tree sap for the Old Gods. The Old Gods are actually a more powerful species who thrive on the sap and are concerned that their supply is running out. Kaena doesn’t believe that the Old Gods are as all-powerful as the local prophet preaches, and decides to find out for herself.
That’s pretty much what I got out of the plot. Along the way, Kaena talks to some comic-relief worm aliens that help guide her and fights some generic-looking monsters with big teeth and no eyes. There’s also a sub-plot involving a conspiracy to overthrow the leader of the Old Gods through some kind of weird, sexual melding.
The visuals of the film fare a little better than the plot does, but not by much. The characters look very cartoony, similar to the characters from “Antz”. Every shot looks either very brown or so crowded with what I can only guess the filmmakers considered detail that it’s difficult to tell what’s going on. There’s a lot of running and jumping around in trees, so the camera moves around pretty quick. There are also scenes that slowdown, but I’m not sure if this was done for effect or because the CGI was screwed up. The design of Kaena’s world is beautiful during the wide shots and the filmmakers do a good job of making her world seem big, even though most of the movie takes place in a tree. The voice acting is quite excellent too. I couldn’t really tell that the movie was dubbed over from French to English and Dunst, along with Angelica Huston and the late Richard Harris, does a fine job with the dialogue.
Those looking for a more mature CGI film instead of “Finding Nemo” should wait for something else to come along. With a slow, confusing plot and bland visuals, “Kaena: The Prophecy” is a big disappointment to animation fans.
RATING: D or 2 out of 5 stars
April 17, 2010
#3
I had so much hope for this film. I remember seeing the previews and thinking that this was going to be an amazing film filled with beautiful visuals and a groundbreaking and imaginative story. Well, I can honestly say that I was only half-right. This was a classic example of a movie that had the potential to stand out and become a force in the computer animated film genre, but instead fell short because it lacked in story and strong characters. With both of these lacking considerably, it was impossible to fully enjoy the perfect surroundings and surreal imagination (which was not missing from this film at all). Instead, what this film boiled down to was a fairly well endowed girl fighting to save her people from these sap creatures that wanted nothing more than to destroy a blue orb that they felt destroyed their people and planet. With all of this destroying and cross-referencing happening, it became obvious on how the directors lost track of their original target and instead found themselves all over the cinematic CGI-created map.
So, let’s begin with the characters. Our heroine, Kaena, was horribly voiced by Kirsten Dunst giving us this modernized voice for a very primitive character. I kept waiting to hear her say “whatever” and get on her cell phone. The voice behind Kaena gave no depth to the characters or the surroundings. Everytime she opened her mouth I kept cringing in my seat wondering why so much was spent on this mismatched voice. The only one that was worth listening to was Richard Harris who did a superb job behind Opaz, giving the right amount of age and wisdom to make us feel sympathy and delight for this strange creature. The rest were pure rubbish. They were all underdeveloped and uncared for which just pushed the overall tone for this film into disgust. I cared nothing for the villagers or even the villains. The reason, I knew nothing about them. How did these villagers evolve and why? Within a time of 600 years, the tree had inhabitants like humans, did anyone else find this odd. Also, who were the sap monsters? The lighting gave no accurate description and they gave us nothing to build on. Were they evil just to be evil? Somebody help me here! This apparent lack of development forced the ending to be nothing but dribble filled with sap and forced emotions.
It became apparent about the middle of this film that the directors had jumped in way over their heads. They had built a world too big for them to handle or fully develop. With so much happening in this film and so many “new” characters, I couldn’t devote my attention to any specific one. Every scene gave us a new visual, and that may work in some films, but for Kaena it just gave us something new to see without any form of explanation. Who were the other inhabitants of the tree and why did they just show up randomly? How could the sap monsters control some and yet not others? What was the connection between all of these characters? My answer to this last question was that there wasn’t any. The directors forced too much onto this film causing the pure basics of filmmaking to be lost. You will find when watching this film that scenes come uneven, fades between them are chaotic, and you never quite know where you will end up next. This creates a sense of uncertainty with the film that should not have been evident. This was no Final Fantasy, but instead an uneven wanna-be that had the potential, but never explored it. Kaena felt like that project that you had two weeks to work on, but somehow find yourself working on it the night before. The whole film seemed like a visual procrastination.
I will give credit to one aspect of this film that I thought was enjoyable and that was the CGI graphics. I don’t know who they had working on their team, but there were some beautiful moments to this film. Not all of it was above par, but there were just scenes that would linger in your mind for days. There also seemed like there were moments when the CGI would transform into regular animation for a brief second or so, I don’t know if it was intentional or part of the story, but for me it worked. If the film would have combined these two styles, I think they would have had a stronger story. The dream sequences were some of the most creative I have seen in film lately. I was impressed of the visuals, but as I said before, the poor characters and story overshadowed them.
Overall, this film could have been great. The imagination behind the story is there, almost on the tip of its tongue, but gets lost somewhere when too much food is forced into the mouth of the story and characters. I really wanted to enjoy this film, but I just couldn’t get past this. The voices were mismatched and the story was just too overwhelming. I needed better voice actors and a better-knitted story. Also, perhaps if Kaena’s breasts were just a bit less I could have appreciated her character a bit more. Whew, those were unnecessary unless the directors of his film were targeting young boys. They were, like the story, a bit too overwhelming.
Grade: ** out of *****
April 17, 2010
#4
I came across this movie at the video store. The cover looked interesting so I decided to rent it. It’s all CGI, like Final Fantasy, and all I can say is that it was that it was one strange movie. The beginning made the movie look promising with a crash of a huge space vessel onto a planet. The story, however, seemed to just drag on from there. The plot revolves around these villagers who lived on what looked to be a huge tree of some kind. They lived a life that amounted to gathering sap for their gods and were lead by a priest who oversaw this task. These people believed that the gods provided and protected them. They blindly did all they could to see that they continued to please the gods. At first I couldn’t quite understand who the gods were. As I see it, they were simply beings who were indigenous to the tree as well.
The villagers also believed that there was nothing else beyond their world and anyone who dared venture past what they call the “great oblivion” would have met with certain death. Kaena, a young girl (with quite a CGI body), was a rebellious indivdual who didn’t quite believe in the gods. She also didn’t subscribe to the notion that there was nothing beyond the “great oblivion”. Her character seemed to have a special connection with her surroundings too. Kaena eventually journeys beyond the village and ends up finding the last surviving member of the crashed space vessel. I won’t give away anymore just in case you’re interested in watching it.
There are a number of scenes that are very hard to make out what is actually going on. Not sure if this was on purpose or if it was simply the dark colors used in creating them.
Would I recommend this movie? Only if, like me, you had a free evening with nothing else to do. If you like animationa and sci-fi, you’ll love the beautiful imagery found in this movie. It’s really the only redeeming thing about this flick.
April 17, 2010
#5
Wow, This movie rocks. Great special effects it gives the movie a real good glow. The story isn’t as bad as people say it is they just wanna moan get it if you havn’t seen it.