By Cassidy Delahunty, editor-in-chief
When trailers for “The Emoji Movie” first started popping up on the internet, my first thought was that writing a review of it would be pointless. Based on the trailers alone, it was easy to see that the movie would be another kids movie that just repeated the same themes using different characters over and over and had no real depth to it.
Suffice to say, I had pretty low expectations going into the theater. Despite that, “The Emoji Movie” fell below the lowest of my low predictions.
“The Emoji Movie” is a story about a world of emojis living inside of a phone. Each emoji makes only one expression, and they dedicate their lives to being on the phone and making that expression when they get clicked on. Of course, our protagonist, Gene, is an exception to that rule. Gene can emote in multiple ways and is shunned by other emojis. He goes on a quest with the other main characters, the high five emoji and an emoji named Jailbreak, to get into the code and fix himself so he will only be able to make one emotion.
The weird thing about this movie was that the plot wasn’t really the problem. Despite the fact that the “be yourself” moral has become pretty overused in children’s movies, other movies with extremely similar concepts, like “Wreck it Ralph”, were well done and enjoyable. The problem with “The Emoji Movie” is that it became increasingly clear as the film went on that no thought had been put into appealing to the target audience: teenagers.
It seems pretty likely to me that the thought process behind drawing in teenagers consisted of assuming that their entire lives revolve around the use of emojis and emojis alone.
No one’s arguing that teenagers hate emojis; I myself use them in text conversations pretty much daily. But making a movie about emojis seemed like making a movie about toothbrushes or kitchen utensils. Yeah, most people use them every day, but that doesn’t mean that any movie revolving around them can be completely lacking in thought out content and still draw an audience.