The Star Review

Christmas is coming in less than two weeks and thus it's rather timely that we currently have in theaters another re-telling of the Nativity story. Because, you know, we needed another one of those. We can't just pick another one of the 10,000 iterations to watch instead. Now that sounds awfully negative, so to make things clear, the story of the Nativity is one that I love. We even have a tradition as a family to read it every Christmas Eve night and oftentimes even act it out. But in terms of cinematic productions, I'm just wondering if this was a story where we needed yet ANOTHER remake of when we already have so many. I mean, there's a popular theory running around that Hollywood has completely ran out of ideas. I'd argue that this is not completely true, but it's movies like this that provide support to this theory. Fortunately, Sony Pictures Animation had some idea of this and so they came up with an idea to retell the story of the Nativity from a perspective that we haven't seen before. The animals! Ummm... say what? Was there even one person on earth that was even remotely curious about what the animal kingdom was thinking when Christ was born? Is there even one person that even cares? I highly doubt that there are many of these people, so why go forward with it?

Like, seriously. I would love to see how the board meetings went down for this movie. I have a picture in my mind of one of those comedy sketches that make fun of board room meetings pitching awful ideas. "Hey, I have an idea! Let's tell the story of the Nativity, except from the perspective of the animals!" "Oh my goodness, that sounds so totally awesome!!!" I'm seriously baffled as to how this idea was even approved. But then you remind yourself what else Sony Pictures Animation has done recently and suddenly everything makes sense. Back in April, they tried to shove a third Smurfs movie, "Smurfs: The Lost Village" down our throats despite the fact that no one cared about this franchise after those awful first two movies. Then they followed that up with "The Emoji Movie" in the summer, which was perhaps one of the worst animated movies I have ever seen. And now after they deliver "The Star" to everyone, they are giving us "Peter Rabbit" this upcoming February followed by "Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation" in the summer. I mean, have you seen those two trailers? Sony has completely lost it. And suddenly I just made you nervous about the animated Spider-Man movie coming out next December, which is what Sony is finishing the year with.

The thing that confused the heck out of me is that when this movie hit theaters a few weeks ago, there were actually people that were enjoying it. I was expecting single digits, or at least in the teens, on Rotten Tomatoes. But yet this started out as positive and is currently at 43 percent with a 75 percent audience score. Is it possible that a movie with such a dumb premise and such cringe-worthy trailers could actually be worth watching? Or is this another situation where some Christians refuse to give a Christian movie bad reviews? I've personally witnessed cinematic atrocities such as "God's Not Dead" or "Fireproof" get praised to the high heavens when in reality every copy of both of those movies deserves to be burned in a fire so that we can wipe those movies from existence. To be fair, there's also some critics who on principle seem to refuse to say one positive thing about any Christian movie. So I often have to go play the voice of reason so that my friends will know which of these Christian movies are actually worth seeing. With some people praising "The Star" and others claiming it's as awful as it looks, I finally decided to bite the bullet and go check this out for myself after nearly a month of avoiding it because I honestly didn't want to.

The first question that came to me while I was watching was that I honestly wondered if the writers of this movie had read the biblical accounts of the Nativity before writing this movie. I get that they were wanting to have some fun with the story, but they got a lot of the chronological events all twisted, which I found kind of annoying. In the movie, when the angel appears to Mary, the star appears immediately after, shining a light on the manger in the stable nine months before Mary and Joseph arrive there. This is done so that we can get our wise men leaving a lot earlier than they probably did as they arrive at King Herod's place before Mary and Joseph even leave for Bethlehem. Thus we have the big macho guy with the sword hunting down Mary, trying to kill her, while they are on the way to Bethlehem. This conveniently allows the wise men to get to Bethlehem at the exact same time as Mary and Joseph so that they walk into the stable a few minutes after the baby is born, before all the shepherds arrive. I was so confused as to why they felt the need to so blatantly twist the story of the Nativity up so bad in order to tell their story of the animals. Not to mention that no one in the movie looks or sounds like they live in the Middle East. It was ridiculous.

But fine. Whatever. I could shrug off them twisting the events around or not portraying the characters accurately. I mean, most people don't realize that the account of the wise men in Matthew doesn't specify the number of wise men that showed up, only the number of gifts they brought, or that Jesus was a young child living in a house when they finally showed up. And most people portray Jesus as an attractive white dude from North America instead of man who looks like a native from his own country. But the fact that nothing else from this movie shows even one ounce of intelligence makes me not want to forgive them for twisting this story. Because it was all done so that they could tell their story of the animals. More specifically, they did this in order to tell the story of Boaz the donkey. He's a donkey working in the mill, walking in circles for his whole existence, with the dream to escape and join the royal caravan. When he finally escapes, he ends up with Mary and Joseph instead. He doesn't like it at first, but he eventually decides that he's going to make the right choice by saving them from Herod's evil henchman with his vicious dogs. We don't even get to Bethlehem until the end of the movie as most of this takes place while on the journey to Bethlehem.

That's our movie. The good animals fighting off the bad animals while Mary and Joseph travel to Bethlehem. While Boaz the donkey fights with himself as to whether he wants to be loyal to Mary and Joseph or chase his dream of joining the royal caravan. And occasionally we switch to the perspective of the camels of the wise men as they learn of Herod's evil plan and also try to stop it. It's absurd. I will admit that Mary and Joseph are fine. They're not great. But they're fine. When we're on them, and only them, the movie plays out like one of those low quality scripture cartoons made for 5-year-olds. It's passable and inoffensive. But when we switch to the animals, which is in fact most of the movie, it becomes extremely annoying because their story arcs are completely worthless and stupid while the voice acting is exaggerated and none of the jokes are remotely as funny as the movie thinks they are. The only time the kids in my theater even laughed were the few moments of the twerking bird as well as the occasional butt or fart jokes. The number of times I personally laughed was zero. The number of times I was moved by their stories or arcs was zero. In general, the number of times I gave a dang about any of the animals in the movie was zero. The number of times I was extremely annoyed was too many to count.

As a whole, this movie is a worthless pile of Christmas junk. Don't see it. Don't take your kids to see it. There are many versions of the Nativity out there and I think all of them are better than this one. If you want something to take your kids to, go see "Coco" or "Wonder." Both of those are great and are perfectly appropriate and enjoyable for both kids and adults. You could even wait for "Ferdinand" or "Jumanji" because I'm guessing family audiences will love those movies, too. What baffles me the most about "The Star" is how they were able to con so many big names into joining this movie. The cast list includes Steven Yeun, Keegan-Michael Key, Gina Rodriguez, Zachary Levi, Kelly Clarkson, Patricia Heaton, Kristin Chenoweth, Tracy Morgan, Tyler Perry, Oprah Winfrey, Christopher Plummer, Ving Rhames, Gabriel Iglesias, Anthony Anderson, Kris Kristofferson and Mariah Carey. I don't understand it. And I laugh at the fact that it got a Golden Globe nomination for the random, useless Mariah Carey song that shows up out of nowhere during the movie. For me all it's earned is a second reservation from a Sony Pictures Animation film this year in my worst movies of the year list that is coming soon, alongside "The Emoji Movie," because I'm giving "The Star" a 3/10.