Movies should first entertain, BUT in a pandemic, they really just need to be on the TV and better than Hallmark Channel Christmas movie background noise.  Lennart Ruff, the director, has an IMDB page similar to the film itself:  there’s moments of talent, but they’re muffled by a plot and directing style that morphs more than the lead character and he loses his fingers and genitals.

The Titan is part of an ever growing eco-disaster film sub-genre that basically want us to recycle or die. If it means these movies will stop, I will sort my plastic (no…no, I won’t).  The Earth is in collapse, but that doesn’t totally make sense either because the film says that the Earth is overpopulated, causing this eco-disaster.  However, it posits that 50%+ of the Earth population will perish….Ok….so wouldn’t we just be Populated then and return to normal over a period of centuries?  This is where I don’t get environmentalism; it has this underlying “I Told You So! Now, it’s all over and there’s nothing you can do about it! HA!” feel to it.

Professor Martin Collingwood (Tom Wilkinson) has a plan to get us off earth and survive by moving to Brooklyn… no wait… Titan the moon that’s around Saturn. But how will Professor Collingwood accomplish this task? He will do it with forced evolution and yelling a lot.  The key to his plan is Lieutenant Rick Janssen. A number of critics and dry white toast claim that Sam Worthington is a bland actor.  I don’t really see that as much as I think he’s trying to be very Gary Cooper and maybe he succeeds. Professor Collingwood arranges to have all these military heroes and Rick go through forced evolution so that they can survive the horrible conditions on Titan, lose their genitals.

As the forced evolution goes forward, Rick changes into an alien. Well? So? That’s what he was supposed to become and …. he did.  I did not understand the outrage with that.  He does end up looking like a space alien mated with a Pandora escapee, but this is about saving the species- sort of.

The last act act was as entertaining as it was disconnected from the preceding plot-line. There was killing, speeches, more killing, a quasi-love scene, anime-tentacle stuff goin on, and he kinda flies at end. It was weird.  It did have some syfy elements, but overall – it was really really dumb.

The biggest issue that I have with the film is that it goes from being directed like a documentary, which was fun to watch like an Apollo 11 behind the scenes feel.  Unfortunately, it went from that to a marriage struggle film, to an Erin Brokovich feel, to a monster movie, and then there was the whole flying around thing, tentacles doing things. It was was more all over the place than a drunken Jackson Pollack.

If it had just picked one genre instead of 30, it would’ve been a pretty great film.  Who are we kidding? You can’t leave your house and those 4800 rolls of toilet paper aren’t making you any healthier.  Really, it’s either this movie or Tiger King. I knew about people in Arkansas getting tigers for years and never sought to know more.  I might watch it eventually, but it rubs me the wrong way for now at least.  See how annoying it is when a person goes off on a tangent?  Imagine that for about two hours, but The Titan is louder than background noise and has no genitals.