Maradontia
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Apr 25, 2016
That's not even what makes it bad. The worst part is probably the editing. The scenes are cut together in a nonlinear way that makes the movie a confusing clusterfuck and destroys any attempt to follow the story if you haven't read the book. At the beginning, there's a narration, then we see Maya and Joey in Maradonia, then a professor talking to children, then some background expostion, then Maya and Joey at school on Earth, then they go to the beach, then they go to Maradonia. But they were already in Maradonia before! There's no explanation for what's happening on screen.
Related to this is the pacing. Uninteresting scenes just drag on and on. There's literally a 10 minute scene of people pretending to writhe in hell at the end.
A close second to the editing is the writing. The movie isn't even a screen version of the book. A lot of scenes were changed or cut out, likely due to budget reasons, to the point where nothing makes any sense. The professor part at the beginning is in the revised version of the book and was added in by Gerry, but it makes everything confusing. Are we listening to this guy tell a fictional story? Is he from the future telling a real story? I don't know. All the classroom scenes with Gloria at the highschool were cut. There's only a quick encounter with the bully in the hallway, then we cut to the next scene with no explanation for why we had to see that. The hoodmen who were hunting Maya and Joey at the beach just vanish when they get to Maradonia. The other soldiers chasing them at the beginning also vanish. The entire concept from the book about Maya and Joey having to complete 7 challenges or "bridges" to become the chosen ones and beat the villain is completely cut out, so they're just sort of wandering around Maradonia encountering stuff at random. The big battle between the teen army and the evil empire was cut, leaving only a small fight between some guy we never met and 3 random mooks. Then we just teleport to Maya and Joey on a wagon. There's no explanation for why the fairies can't kill them. It's also extremely unclear what's happening with general Justin. A guy is banging a drum, then a ghost appears, then Justin eats poison. What purpose does any of this serve to the story?
Related to that, a big problem is the casting. It becomes very evident that they couldn't afford to pay extras, so crowd scenes are extremely sparse and are mostly made up of people Gerry knows. This creates bizarre situations like the class the professor visits having 10 students aged 8 to 17 in it, the highschool having only about 20 students total, Maya and Joey going to the hotel party that only has about 10 elementary school aged boys at it, and the rebel army having about 5 teenagers in it. This completely destroys any sense of immersion for the audience.
Then there's the sound. The dialogue is so poorly recorded it's sometimes hard to hear what's being said, especially since generic music plays constantly and is too loud. I don't think there's a single 5 second period in this movie that doesn't have music playing. The only time the dialogue isn't hard to hear is when it's being SCREAMED into the microphone by overdramatic actors, and can hurt your ears.
Overall, I've honestly seen community theater plays more entertaining and realistic than this. You or I could make a play out of the book better than this movie.
Last edited:
