LogFAQs > #975348646

13. Ron's Gone Wrong

Plasma: 7
Suprak: 7
Karo: 10
Inviso: 14
Red: 15
Ermine: 16
Johnbobb: 18
Evillord: 23
Mythiot: 26

Total: 136

Plamsa: Initially it appeared that RGW was gonna be a creatively bankrupt sci-fi tale about a kid buying an iPhone Robot in order to fit in, but Rons defectiveness sent the story in some intriguing directions. It felt like a modernized take on E.T., and the movie has plenty of heart, not to mention the willingness to look deeper into its supporting cast. Ill admit the worldbuilding is shaky, the villain is cartoonishly evil, and the final act was pretty absurd, but for the most part I loved this one.

Suprak: *no writeup submitted*

Karo: In a near future everyones smartphones are turned into egg shaped robots and quite surprisingly Dr Robotnik is not involved.
In order to be cool kid in school you have to have one of these 'B-bots', and when our protagonist finally gets one he is dismayed to find out it isn't... working quite right.
You see, due to physical damage, 'Ron' cannot connect to the internet, meaning all company protocols for safe and sane B-bot operation go out the window and chaos ensues. Ron has freedom of thought but zero knowledge or experience to go along with it, which leads to him being 'helpful' in a number of horrific ways which includes, but not limited to: nearly murdering a child, publicly sharing Barney's toilet training pics, and sending friend requests to drug addicts and QAnon cultists.
In case you couldn't tell, this has a bit more edge to the humor than the offerings of Disney and Pixar.
As the connection between the two grows, Barney realizes that Ron is better the way he is rather than just thinking like everyone else. Barney didn't need a connection to social media, he needed a friend, and the online social platforms he desired were fake, vapid and only caused hurt. Holy fuck, it is like someone took every negative feeling I have towards social media and made a movie about it.
Anyway not-Apple decides that Ron is a security risk and a legal liability and seeks to have him destroyed and replaced with a 'proper' B-bot, leading up to a very touching ending where Ron sacrifices his consciousness to become a friend for all the children of the world.
All in all, it's a very good first film from a new animation studio and I can't wait to see what they will come up with in the future.

Inviso: This feels like an amalgamation of Big Hero 6s weird, Apple-esque BFF, Mitchells vs. the Machines whole modern day tech toys against a family of old schoolers attitude, and the Emoji Movies desperation to truly capitalize on the current era of social media bullshit. Despite this, I think the movie turned out about as well as it could. There was some definite cringe, namely when it came to Rich and Savannahs channels, and the social commentary was a bit on the nose (especially the Steve Jobs corporate businessman), but I think the film did ultimately have a heart to it. Amidst all of the social media noise, this is the story about a weird kid that has trouble making friends, and in a roundabout way, he makes the greatest friend of all. Barney doesnt always get along with Ron, but I think thats kind of the messagefriends dont need to just be there for you as a perfect sycophant, and thats what made Ron so special. Plus, this movie ultimately gets some extra points for the cry factor.

Vis Cry Count 7: When Ron, on low battery, carried an asthma-riddled Barney out of the woods to save his life, at his own expense.

Vis Cry Count 8: When Ron sacrificed himself and Barney said goodbye, all to make everyone else happy the way Barney was with his friend.

Red: You want smart phones? Nah. You get smart friend AI which knows every little thing about you and will be your best friend. Unless you are the only poor person on the planet then you get a broken outdated model that will attempt to destroy the world. Honestly, its hard to look at the world today and think anyone on the tech side of this is altruistic, the CEO would be evil, the guy convinced he could give everyone robot friends that also know everything about them is probably also evil. None of this would be as good as they say. But you know, it was released a couple years ago so no one really saw this coming. But we will settle in the middle here and say this is a fun story about weird robots and kids learning that things not being entirely perfect can be kind of fun. Not spectacular, a little conceptually on the nose with society in a way that gets a little uncomfortable, but not a completely horrible movie.

Ermine: I'll go ahead and say it. The ONLY thing keeping this movie from my bottom 10 is the fact that Ron is a good and fun character and is the lifeblood of the film as a whole. Every other character in this film is trash and the plot / story is so thin and one note... maybe I should put this lower...
Eh.
Despite how uninteresting and underwhelming the rest of the cast is, the film as a whole is fairly inoffensive. I enjoy Barney and Ron's relationship and how it grows and changes over the film. And hey, I'll also go ahead and say that Ron > Baymax.

Johnbobb: There's a lot of dumb in this movie, but there's also a lot of heart, and sometimes that's a hard line to walk. It's also a little out of touch with reality in many ways and (like many movies) doesn't understand much about how virality works or what the population of an average public school can afford for their kids. It does do a good job portraying the lengths a major corporation will go to out of greed, but of course there's also the one rich designer with the heart of gold and blaaaah. It's not a very good movie, but there IS good in it.

Evillord: I feel like I've seen this same movie thirty times in my life. It's another children's film with the same 3D animation as every American animated feature where half of the script feels like out of touch corporate execs trying and badly failing to understand the kids of today. Most of the kids in this movie, besides the main character, are never seen doing anything besides making social media posts. To be fair, exaggerated as it is, that is the main point of the movie and central to their arcs. This film is about an obvious pastiche of Apple creating an iFriend, with the villain an incredibly on the nose evil CEO who rants about how much he loves money but hates children and ethics every time he's on screen, but he's counterbalanced by a shy, nerdy idealist CEO named "Mark" and the solution to the central conflict isn't to have kids ditch their consumer electronics but just to modify them slightly. It falls firmly into the comfort zone of "let's critique the obvious world-ruining flaws of capitalism but we're ultimately owned by Disney so be sure not to critique them TOO hard".
As I sat through this adventure about a short brown-haired boy with big ears and his friend, a defective and possibly dangerous robot learning to develop its own sense of identity, the realization gradually dawned that I was watching an extremely poor man's version of The Iron Giant. At least the Bulgarian grandma is funny, and I'll give them that the robot, with his goofy marketable face and focus-testedly adorable naivete is actually a little bit cute.

Mythiot: *no writeup submitted*