Family Guy: Something, Something, Something, Dark Side

Impressions before seeing it
The first one, Blue Harvest, was cool and funny. I was looking forward to the sequel even though it didn't need to exist.

How was it?
As in the first one, the animation looked really good and they clearly used some 3D models to enhance the ships and such. However, the writing has "lazy" and "paycheck" written all over it. Now, let me stop for a second to say that I am not one of those people who thinks Family Guy has gone downhill. I generally enjoy the new episodes. But I will also point out that I'm not a fan of American Dad or The Cleveland Show, so Seth McFarlane is hit and miss for me I suppose.

So anyway, Dark Side kicks off with the same opening as last time: the power goes out so Peter entertains his family with the tale of the next Star Wars movie. They could have at least put the family in a different situation for the sake of avoiding repetition, but I can also understand trying to make it sort of a tradition, so fine, whatever. But as we get into it, the humour becomes a problem. First of all, it looks like they used up all of their good Star Wars jokes in the first one, because there aren't even enough in this one to justify it as a Star Wars parody. The other big problem is that they seem to have fallen into the current trend of constant "reference humour". I know they do that a lot on the show as well, but in that case they usually at least contain some jokes. Here they are the joke, replicating (notice I didn't say parodying) scenes from random movies and commercials, which means the only possible response they can elicit is "LOL I AM FAMILIAR WITH THAT!" because there is literally no other way it can be funny. Some people like that kind of humour, and that's fine, but I personally do not, and my problem with Dark Side is that Family Guy does not usually rely so heavily on that type of thing. If I'm not wrong, I think people mostly just watch Family Guy for the random flashbacks, and when you take that away from the show, as they did here, then it loses its appeal. At least Blue Harvest had Star Wars parody jokes to fall back on. So as I said in the first place, there should not have been a sequel. Unfortunately it looks like they're planning on doing one for all of the Star Wars movies, because part 3 is already in production.

Recommendation
I only laughed a few times but overall I was disappointed and it wasn't really worth watching. Fans should just stick to Blue Harvest.

Fanboys

Impressions before seeing it
Didn't know much about it except that the idea sounded kind of fun, it took forever to be released, and it has Kristen Bell, who I'm starting to like.

How was it?
Maybe my expectations were high but this could have been a better movie than it was. It didn't have the charm that other road trip movies tend to have, and it kind of fell flat on the "teen comedy" level as well. Also I just don't like Dan Fogler (how did this guy get into movies?), who was supposed to be the funny one but wasn't.

But to talk about the positives: it is at least entertaining and has plenty of fun cameos if you enjoy that sort of thing. I also liked Seth Rogan playing two roles, one a Star Trek fan and the other a Star Wars fan, and then getting into a fight with himself. If you are a big Star Wars fan then this movie might hold an extra level of enjoyment for you because it's also full of references to the series, although my personal favourite part was when the gang was looking through George Lucas's memorabilia room and one kid got excited about Willow's spellbook and nobody else cared. That kid would be me, because I am a huge Willow fan and think it's actually way more fun than all of the Star Wars films put together. I hope what the movie was trying to do by inserting that moment was to hint at how underrated Willow is, but more likely they were probably saying it sucks. Dicks.

Recommendation
If you're a hardcore Star Wars fan you might get a kick out of it. For anyone else, it's average at best.