The Fishtank: Artemis Foul (or, How to Fix a Broken Movie)

Finally we come to the casting, for which I’ve made my thoughts relatively clear. Ferdia Shaw is fine as Artemis, and it’s just the characterisation I didn’t like (between you and me, I’m surprised he was even Irish). Lara McDonnell’s Holly Short is also fine, but does suffer from some whitewashing (but considering the other casting, I think we can all overlook this one). Unfortunately, this is where the passing grade stops.

Butler was one of the most miscast characters of all time. I enjoyed Anozie in his relatively small role in Game of Thrones, but he was absolutely the wrong choice to play Butler in this movie. In the books, one of Butler’s strongest attributes is his ability to blend into any mixture of Asian/Eastern European crowds (leaving aside his immense size). Casting a black man in that role takes that away from the get go, but even that may have been acceptable if they didn’t give him white hair and such piercing blue eyes (Butler is described as having dark blue eyes, so maybe this was just a misinterpretation on my part). In the same boat, however, the movie turns Juliet from a badass in her own right into ‘Domovoi’s niece’, who did two things in the movie: make Artemis a sandwich, and scream for help.

Judi Dench is a phenomenal actress, of course, but casting her (and indeed, any woman) as Commander Root takes a dump on the entire relationship between Root and Holly, and especially dampens Holly being the first woman in the male-dominated world of the LEPrecon. This felt like a concerted effort to put more women in the movie, despite it ruining one of Holly’s defining characteristics and the relationship between the characters.

I ran the gamut on how I felt about Josh Gad as Mulch, and it wasn’t until Little Monsters that I thought maybe he’d be okay. I was wrong. Whilst I’m surprised they got a few of his abilities correct – unhinging the jaw, and the lockpick hair, and I think I saw him fart at one point – he was absolutely not visually correct. Much like Root’s casting, deciding Mulch to be a ‘giant dwarf’ is not just an artistic choice, it’s a direct slap in the face of the sourse material.

Regarding characters like Foaly, Briar Cudgeon and Opal Koboi; they can all be pretty much anyone. My fan casting for Foaly is not based on anything Nikesh Patel has done, and I was in fact fan casting based on the things I have seen the others in. Opal Koboi is an interesting one for the sequel movies, and perhaps Judi Dench could have played her (though this would also be a departure from the books, I admit).

Artemis Fowl was a bad movie. It would have needed some real work to be great, but there is no reason it could not have been at least ‘good’. But as it stands, it just gets added to the pile alongside Eragon, Percy Jackson, Avatar: The Last Airbender and Dragonball Evolution, among many more, in the garbage pile.