Young Adult books are big business, but as if you didn’t already know that. Since Harry Potter became the phenomenon it was, studios have been clamouring to recreate its success with their own YA films. Some of these have been enjoyable and some…. not so much. I read a decent amount of YA books when I was younger (okay… so maybe I still occasionally do—shout out to the excellent Six of Crows series) but, oddly, out of all the YA series I read, somehow all of them escaped the clutches of Hollywood’s adaptive claws (minus Potter of course). When I first heard that Disney was adapting Artemis Fowl, a series I remember quite fondly, I was pretty excited to see what the mouse was going to do with it. Today, the first trailer for Artemis Fowl dropped and gave us our first look at the flick.
The trailer opens with images of Fowl Manner, the aptly named residence of Artemis, while we receive some off-screen exposition voiced by what sounds like an older fairy. Fowl Manner looks amazing and exactly as I imagined it when first reading the series. After seeing Fowl Manner, we are given a spectacular shot of Haven city, the secret underground city of fairies and other magical beings. On my first viewing of the trailer, I was blown away at how great these two locations look, and how accurate to how I remember imagining them to be. The imagery and exposition are scored by Radiohead’s ‘Decks Dark’ giving everything an eerie yet grand feeling as only Radiohead can muster.
From here, we are introduced to our leading man Artemis Fowl (Ferdia Shaw) accompanied by his butler (played by Nonso Anozie) discovering a Fairy. The discovery is followed by a small action montage featuring them both. This portion of the trailer started to lose me a bit. Once Artemis is introduced, the trailer suddenly shifts tonally, looking more akin to a kid’s film than even a YA flick. The montage looks a little less Hunger Games and a little more Spy Kids. Also, yes Artemis is twelve years old in the books, but now that I have seen him on screen… how is this child a criminal mastermind, exactly? Am I just old? Perhaps the film has been in development for so long, I have grown too worn and grizzled to appreciate it. Or, on the other hand, perhaps they would have been best suited to age up the character to capture a wider audience. Either way, the boy is baby-faced, and it disconcerts me.
In the end, this is a solid trailer and we don’t really see enough of the characters to work out whether it’s going to be more of a YA film or a kid’s film. Starting out grandiose and then taking it down with an awkwardly edited mini-action montage, the trailer’s tonal shift has added some hesitation to my initial excitement. Either way, after so long in development hell, it will be interesting to see if this film was worth the wait.
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