Going into the 2016 film adaptation of Ratchet & Clank I was cautiously optimistic. Video game movies have a reputation for being notoriously bad, but the decision to forego live action sounded like the perfect direction. At least as far back as 2007’s Tools of Destruction I could remember the popular appraisal that the series was like “playing a Pixar movie,” so an animated movie was the natural evolution of this idea. When the negative reviews started pouring in I still wasn’t deterred, critics panned the Pokémon movies and millions of children still love those films to this day. I’m a fan of the series, this movie couldn’t be that bad could it?
The fundamental problem with this movie is a complete lack of a compelling screenplay. Ratchet starts off dreaming of becoming a Galactic Ranger, but despite his initial rejection he joins the team with relative ease. Clank has no real connection with Ratchet, with the pair seemingly only together because “finders keepers.” Quark’s growing jealousy of Ratchet is drilled in with the subtlety of a sledgehammer as Ratchet shows him up at least half a dozen times in quick succession. But perhaps the most damning problem is the lack of meaningful stakes.
At one point in the movie Ratchet fails to stop the villain’s plan and a planet gets destroyed. This would be a workable catalyst for Ratchet to doubt himself at the end of the second act, but the repeated mentions of “don’t worry, the planet’s already been evacuated” suck out the drama and make Ratchet’s resolve feel unearned going into the climax. The story feels sanitized to the point of sterilization, leaving only a hollow facsimile of a generic blockbuster.
Perhaps the biggest lesson to takeaway from the failure of Ratchet & Clank is the dangers of the “multimedia experience.” Around the same time as the film, a tie-in game was released as something of a reboot of the series. The game expands on the film a bit and features clips from the film as cutscenes. The interplay between the film and the game sounds great on paper, but this forces the team working on the story for both to divide their attention between two projects, causing the narratives of both to suffer. It takes a lot of effort to make one project turn out well, splitting your effort between several projects simultaneously only increases the chances that each individual project will either be subpar, or better off condensed into a single project. Ambition is an admirable trait in any creative endeavor, but Ratchet & Clank proves that ambition spread too thin is indistinguishable from no ambition at all.
Sometime Around Midnight 