The Emoji Movie is cynical, dull, exhausting, soulless, joyless, pointless, and never, ever funny. But on the other hand, I enjoy the faces of disappointed children, so for me the whole experience was really kind of a wash.
Our action takes place within the smartphone of a high school freshman named Alex. Alex has a crush on a girl in his class named Addie, with whom he only communicates via text. (That's the first thing you need to know about The Emoji Movie: it shows us a world where teenagers' faces are constantly pointed down at their smartphones, and it says: Yes. Yes, this is the natural order of things. The best you can hope for is to find someone to love, so you can spend your lives sitting next to each other staring at the glowing $800 rectangles in your hands.)
The emojis live in an area of the smartphone called Textopolis, where they await deployment from Alex's fingers. Because it is crucial that Alex's texts be clear and concise, each emoji must play his or her role perfectly: Crying Guy must always be crying, Thumbs Up must remain enthusiastic. An interesting aspect of Textopolis is that there are no letters in it at all; the film suggests that children communicate exclusively in emojis. They are post-word. This may well be true in real life; I have no idea because I don't have children of my own, and after having seen this movie, I'm taking a break from my nieces and nephews for a little while.
The hero of this film is the Meh emoji, whose name is Gene for some reason. (His dad is Meh-l, his mom is Meh-ry. Do you get it? You get it. It is tempting to imagine that the writers of this movie are positing chronic ambivalence as a genetic condition by naming the main character Gene, but the truth is that everything in this movie was done in a great big hurry.) Gene is voiced by T.J. Miller, so he is high-energy. He is filled with all different kinds of emotions, so he finds it difficult to settle down and just be Meh. It is his first day on the job as an emoji, and right away he is called up to the big leagues when Alex tries to send a Meh text to the girl he loves—you know how you're always doing that when you're young, always sending your crush messages that say, "I don't feel any kind of way about anything, and I want you to know"—but he is so nervous that he can't hold a Meh face. He lets all his emotions out, and the kid ends up sending an emoji that is all crazy: smoke coming forth from one nostril, tongue hanging out, one eye an X. Oh, the humiliation! So Alex loses face with Addie, and Gene is sent off on his hero's journey to become an emoji that literally says nothing.
This film is called The Emoji Movie, but only a few emojis make more than a cameo appearance. Maya Rudolph is Smiler, the first emoji ever, who runs the whole show and is of course a chipper Tracy Flick nightmare of hostility and repressed anger. Ana Faris is Jailbreak, a hacker emoji who was originally a princess, but who ran away because on the original emoji keyboard, women could only be princesses or brides (or, you know, the smiley emoji who we have just moments ago established is in charge of all of Textopolis, but this movie bets that your kid won't remember that, because this movie hates your kid). James Corden is Hi-5, who has recently lost his position in Alex's Favorite Emojis bar, the VIP section of Textopolis. "Oh, that's interesting," you allow yourself to think for one moment. Has he lost his spot to a less-enthusiastic emoji, because Alex is now a moody adolescent, and will the movie send a message about the importance of positivity in online communication? Ha, no, of course not, because it is too busy pitching diarrhea jokes at parents and their exhausted, annoyed children.
Sir Patrick Stewart plays Poop, the poop emoji, who we meet when he is in a bathroom stall with his young son, who is also poop. They are going number two in there, because this is a world in which Poop itself has to poop, and the kid asks if they should wash their hands afterwards, and then they both laugh and laugh. Textopolis is filthy. Later in the film, when Poop is trying to convince Smiler not to kill Gene, someone tells him, "Poop, you're getting soft." "Oh," he replies, slowly and with relish, "I hope not toooooo soft!" This film asks you to contemplate loose anthropomorphic CGI stools, and to hold onto that thought for a long moment. I'm no happier about this paragraph than you are.
So Gene, Jailbreak and Hi-5 leave Textopolis and travel around the various apps in Alex's phone on their way to Dropbox, where they can be uploaded to the cloud, and Gene can lose all of his emotions forever, because I guess this is what we're rooting for. Along the way, they make stops at Candy Crush, Just Dance, YouTube, Spotify, and whoever else paid Sony a lot of money. All of their adventures cause Alex's smartphone to make noises at inappropriate times, so he decides to make an appointment at the Smartphone Store to have the whole thing wiped. So now there's a ticking clock counting down to Alex's appointment, which all of the emojis must stop from happening, even though our protagonist's sole objective is actual oblivion.
Anyway, they stop the whole thing with moments to spare, because of course they do, and here's how: Addie shows up at the Smartphone Store just as Alex's phone is about to be erased. Gene knows she's there somehow, and he works his way up to the texting area of Textopolis, and he just displays all of his feelings and the text goes to Addie's phone. Love and disgust and fear and death and farts. Just all of it. All of Gene's emotions, plus just whatever else the animation team had time to throw in there. She gets that text, and she goes up to Alex and says, "That's a cool emoji," just like kids are always saying to one another, and they finally talk in real life and they go to the Fall Dance, where they dance for two seconds and then immediately start taking selfies because actual human contact is an empty experience unless you involve your fucking phone in it somehow.
So that's the message The Emoji Movie leaves you with. Don't know what to say? Who cares? Just say whatever. Just put everything out there, without regard for clarity, consistency, or concern for the valuable time of the people you're putting it out to. (The writers of this movie really took this message to heart.) The important thing is that you're using your smartphone to do it. Just keep looking down, and if you have one spare moment you might be tempted to use for self-reflection, fill that shit with Candy Crush.
The Emoji Movie is how Luddites are made. I watched children walk into the theater and excitedly take their seats before the lights went down, I watched disillusioned adults shuffle out. (Seriously. The mother in front of me turned to her six-year-old son and said, "Jesus, Zephyr—are you balding?") Gene does not fulfill his objective of becoming an emotionless husk, but I sure did.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to throw my iPhone into the Pacific Ocean and live the rest of my life in a tree.
