The Last Movie You Watched

[Rev. Rye]

This week in the Deep Hurting Project: Space Chimps 2: Zartog Strikes Back. Well, I watched the first one in preparation for this review (a number of times, actually, but mostly because the movie was just that forgettable.) And it's this sequel that landed its place in the Project, not the original. So, let's have a go at it:

• Why does everything look worse than the original? Did they just expect that 3D would be a good substitute for visuals that were actually passable?
  
• So, it looks like three of the cast members have been replaced, including Andy Samberg (who plays the first film's protagonist Ham III; replaced by an obvious Tom Kenney), Jeff Daniels (who somehow voiced the titular bully/conqueror Zartog and replaced him with John DiMaggio), and Kristin Chenoweth (who played Boobfart alien Kilowatt, replaced by Laura Bailey.) So, on the one hand, it's nice to see a sequel that actually reunites most of the cast, what with all the sequels I've covered that might have a producer or two in common with the original, on the other hand, even the actors who were in the original sound so off that I still had to check and see if they were in the original.
  
• BananaBerry? So, like, an apple as percieved by an African Grey Parrot? 
  
• Why is the interstellar rocket so goddam easy to set off?
  
• So, what does Zartog expect to actually do? If I remember the first film, literally everything in the original that he could use to hold onto power is on his old planet.
  
• And, of course they meddle in the "is Pluto a planet" controversy. Of course.
  
• Wait, I know the chimps managed to make a one-way rocket come back to Earth, but how do they expect them to terraform an entire planet?
  
• Crap, Zartog's subplot is barely going to actually be a plot. It's just him trying and repeatedly failing to actually do anything after the rocket launch frees him from his metallic prison (except that he was the nose cone of the reconstructed rocket in the first movie, so, how does his being further away break his metallic mold?
  
• Oh, look, a porno reference in this kid's movie.
  
• So, why does the planet look like the old wallpaper from Windows XP now?
  
• Well, Titan seems very non-chalant about the whole "Zartog coming back to life" thing.
  
• These scientists seems very nonchalant about the possibility that their work might be used for crimes against humanity.
  
• Well, this may be the worst dance scene I've seen in a movie:
  
  
  
• Didn't Zartog almost kill you a movie ago, Titan? Why aren't you taking this possible threat to the universe seriously?
  
• Oh, I'm being departiclized and my DNA's being transmogrified. Even the characters in Death Bed weren't this bored by the threat.
  
  
  
• Is it weird that I actually want to watch G-Force now?
  
• So, Ham magicks the departiclizer into his hands, and then magicks it into Zartog's hand?
  
  
  
• And, something that carries on from the original film: why is a flatbed truck the best place to land a spaceship?
  
• If only we didn't have a three-video-per-post limit, that way, I could play "Lascia Ch'io Pianga."
  
• And why can the departiclizer reparticle all the people who were departicleized, except for Zartog? And why does it change up their voices?
  
• Wait, did Kilowatt actually do anything except make loud noises during the trip?
  

Well, in conclusion, both movies were crap, but at least the original one had a fucking plot. And it didn't send the studio that made it into dormancy for five years.

So, I expect that this is going to be the last movie I check out of the library for the Project (at least until the first and third films in the Atlas Shrugged trilogy return to the library and/or The Littlest Light on the Christmas Tree comes out of storage with the rest of the Christmas movies), and, while I said I planned to go into the wells of Amazon Prime's library, since it turns out I can actually use their streaming service now, Netflix just dropped a strange piece of shit called Pets United that's basically (The Secret Life of Pets meets Robots with a plot outline based on an obscure novel my Erich Kästner that the director made into a movie a decade ago). And hopefully, the week after, I'll be taking on Steven Segal's Attack Force on Amazon Prime.