Let’s take a look back for a moment, shall we? In 2002, a beautiful family film about a mammoth, sloth, and saber-tooth tiger delivering a baby back to its family was released. The animation wasn’t incredible, but the story and characters were so fun and full of heart. Almost everyone who has seen it looks back on it fondly, remembering the beautiful story of three outcasts bonding and finding family in each other while they brought this baby back home. Four years later, a sequel came out adding a few more characters to the family dynamic. It felt disconnected and not as genuine as the first, but it isn’t a bad movie. It’s still sweet and fun. A third movie would come out in 2009, a fourth in 2012, and a fifth in 2016. They got progressively worse and worse, the third being not totally awful and the fifth being absolutely absurd. There was even a short film about the little squirrel Scrat in 2006 but no one gives a shit about that.
In my freshman year of college, a little over two years ago, I was tasked with watching all of them and writing about it. So I did. And that was the end of it. Badda bing badda boom. I can go on with my life.
WRONG!!! Disney fucking hates me apparently! The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild was released as a Disney+ exclusive movie on January 28, 2022. This dead horse has been beaten to hell and back, but apparently it must suffer an eternal punishment. Buck Wild was the tour guide around the dinosaur world and feral friend to the herd (the name of the main group of animals in Ice Age) in the third movie Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. He was an eccentric character and an entertaining addition to the movie. But after that movie, he wasn’t really in either of the other movies apart from brief moments in the 2016 movie.
As it would seem, NONE of the original cast wanted to do a sixth movie. The only voice actor seemingly willing to reprise his role was Simon Pegg, voice actor of Buck. So, Disney thinks, why not recast the entire main cast, make Crash and Eddie—the two most annoying characters—the center of attention, go back to the dinosaur world, and make another movie! Also, they decided to close down Blue Sky Studios, the original animators of the Ice Age franchise, as the movie was being made! Also, Disney lost a legal battle with Scrat’s original creator Ivy Silberstein and can no longer use this character that they stole in the first place! Shoutout Ivy Silberstein, by the way, glad you got the rights to the little guy taken away from the big guys who took him.
This movie was doomed from the start. So of course, I watched it. And somehow, it was worse than the last movie.
The animation did NOT look finished. Occasionally it looked fine, but for a majority of the entire movie it seemed so rushed and like some steps in the process were skipped entirely. It was slapped together by some poor animators who probably had no choice but to rush. I felt like I was watching the making of The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild. Like the story I wrote in middle school that I stopped writing because I was afraid my mom would read it and saw that I wrote about kissing, this movie was unfinished and likely never will be.
Crash and Eddie are so fucking annoying, dude. Oh my god I never liked them. Until the end, UNTIL THE VERY END, their existence as the protagonists was ENTIRELY pointless. They wandered into the dinosaur world to gain independence, run into Buck, and are dragged along in his adventures of ending mammal discrimination as they sit back and do jack shit. If anything, they make things worse for him. They spend their screen time (that isn’t spent causing Buck and Z—Buck’s female weasel companion who surprisingly doesn’t look like she was given weasel boobs—problems) they are discussing ways they can potentially improve and develop as characters but immediately ditching them or making things even worse in their attempts to. They dance around potential character development until the very end where they go “Oh right! We’re leaving to be more independent! Almost forgot!”. They are the main characters but the story is not ever about them. I do not give a shit about these twin ferret-shaped possums. Stop putting them on my screen.
The villain was so boring. Just a dinosaur who was bullied for his big ass brain that protrudes out of his own head. By the way, I would also bully him. That’s not where your brain goes. It goes inside your skull, dumbass. He takes his anger out on mammals who I don’t think were even the only animals bullying him. I think the dinosaurs were equally as awful to him. Why does he want to discriminate against the mammals when the dinosaurs were equally as bad? Did mammals have like anything to do with this? Did I watch this movie wrong? His motives were so boring and he was so annoying. I hate nerds too so I think that didn’t help. God, I fucking love bullying nerds haha get in the locker, idiot.
The backstory between Z and Buck wasn’t explored enough. They were supposed to have tension because of the rest of their superhero group being dead or whatever. But they spent no time on it. Their fighting felt like I was watching the most boring high school couples shit talking each other on social media. I didn’t ask to be roped into it and I honestly don’t know a lot of what’s going on and it’s not interesting enough for me to care.
Another thing to point out is that so many characters that were important in the two previous films were not even remotely mentioned in this movie. Diego got a tiger girlfriend with titties in the fourth movie who appeared in the fifth movie. Manny and Peaches had a baby in the third movie who got married in the fifth movie. Peaches, Peaches’s malewife, and titty tiger were not even spoken of. Did they do something? Are they dead? Did they commit some heinous crime that even Diego cannot stomach?
I would take the absurd clusterfuck that is Ice Age: Collision Course over the adventures of Butt Wild any day (that’s a funny joke about Buck that was somehow never in any of the movies he was in. Clearly I am a better writer). This was a boring mess of gags that ran on for too long and half developed plots and characters.How did we get here? How did a beautiful, simple story about family and finding yourself turn into a movie that just felt like a poorly written Ice Age fanfic adapted to film? You know what, it’s worse than that. My friends and I went to see if Ice Age fanfiction did exist because it was funny and somehow the bullshit we found was better than this. I am so filled with rage over this story progression. I want to sob in front of the writers. I want them to know my wrath and feel my sorrow. This is the darkest timeline. Ice Age wasn’t meant to be like this. Leave now, I am in mourning. I’m done writing, I’m booking an appointment with my therapist and unpack the utter shit this movie has taken on my brain.
