Flashback Friday

Flashback Friday!

The Simpsons Movie (2007)

Movie Information: 

Warning: This may contain spoilers.

Parents' Guide: Usually PG-13 for irreverent humour, profanity, sexual reference, nudity and violence.

After an incident pollutes Lake Springfield, Lisa Simpson convinces the town to help clean up and protect the water. In the meantime, Homer Simpson saves and adopts a pig (Spider Pig), who had been about to be slaughtered for food at the Krusty Burger. After two days, Spider Pig manages to fill up a silo with waste. When Homer realizes he doesn't have enough time to go to the dump to safely get rid of the silo, he decides to throw the silo into the lake instead, polluting it once more.

The head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Russ Cargill, decides that Springfield is too dangerous and convinces the president to put a dome of Springfield, trapping the residents inside. Soon after the dome is put in place, everyone finds out that it had been Homer that polluted the lake, so the Simpsons are hunted down. Luckily, they escape through a sinkhole and move to Alaska.

Not long after that, it is decided that Springfield must be destroyed. After hearing the news, the Simpsons decide to head back to Springfield in order to attempt to save the town.

My Review:

The Simpsons, an American satirical, animated sitcom, has been around since 1989. It began as a parody of what an average middle-class American family life looked like, but slowly became a cultural phenomenon, that pretty much took over the world. I don't even live in America, but I can tell you right now, I'd be hard-pressed to find anyone that hasn't watched the Simpsons. 

For all of those who grew up watching the show, it was pretty much been unanimously agreed upon that the show began to decline in quality over the years, but it still has a few episodes here and there that throwback to the good old days. Due to this decline, a lot of people believed that the chance for a Simpsons movie to actually be good, had already come and gone long before the movie was even announced.  

Thankfully, for anyone who doesn't take these things too seriously, the movie actually had slicker animation than the episodes ever did, as well as the same humour and biting satire that made many people fall in love with the show, to begin with. The whole eighty-seven-minute creation was filled with exactly the kind of sly cultural references and non-stop irreverent humour that you would expect from the Simpsons, which a lot of true fans were (and mostly still are) very appreciative of after so many years of waiting for a movie to be made. It was met with mostly positive reviews, won four awards, and it was the highest grossing animated TV adaption of all time.

In saying that, the movie was pretty much just like watching a really long Simpsons episode. There wasn't really anything about it that made it any more special than what you'd see if you just stayed home and watched an episode, and for many fans, eighty-seven minutes wasn't long enough after such a long wait. Although the film had some of the better qualities of the earlier TV episodes, it still felt like an episode. When you've had to go to the cinema to watch it, then you want something epic and unique, which the movie fell short of.

Still, if you like the Simpsons, now or in the past, then you'll most likely enjoy the movie! And if for some strange reason you've never watched the Simpsons, then watching the movie is a great way to see if you'd like the type of humour that's usually seen in the TV series, so I would recommend watching it at least once.

~The Elf