Ice Age: Collision Course
Ice Age: Collision Course
28 June 2016
Rating: G Release date: 23 June
It’s the fifth film in this evolutionary saga, but Ice Age producers are still delivering the same messages for little minds.
Scrat, the acorn-obsessed saber-tooth squirrel discovers an alien spaceship buried in prehistoric ice. His bumbling leads to an outer-space adventure, during which he inadvertently creates the solar system, and sets a huge asteroid on a collision course with earth. Manny the mammoth, Diego the sabre-tooth tiger and Sid the sloth now have to unite their families and friends in a new quest to avoid extinction.
They team up with an astronomer weasel named Neil, who has a plan to stop the meteor. Following the instructions of an ancient tablet, our prehistoric heroes journey to the crystalline paradise of Geotopia. There they discover the spiritual leader Shangri Llama, who holds the keys to avoiding the coming catastrophe – or does he?
The Ice Age franchise has been plodding along a plot-line mapped out by the theory of evolution. Of course, ice ages, dinosaurs and continental drifts have been pushed into the single lifetime of its characters for the sake of drama. Yet the end result is the same: an affirmation of a godless univverse where all life submits to the irresistible forces of nature.
In Ice Age: Collision Course life is a result of chance plus the survival of the fittest. What emerges is 100 minutes of subtle opposition for parents trying to raise kids with a confidence that comes from knowing they have a loving, sovereign creator.
Ice Age: Collision Course does affirm the bonds of family and friendship, but its dialogue often undercuts that intention. The jokes include the now familiar lowlevel toilet humour that passes for kids comedy. More annoying, though, are the put-downs that characters like Manny and Diego constantly deliver to those who are supposed to be their friends.
Most worrying of all is the introduction of religious figures like Shangri Llama. However well-intentioned, his offer of ludicrous yoga positions in the face of real disaster tars all people of faith with the same silly brush. In the end, it will be practical people like Manny who manage to save us.
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