Don’t be fooled by the title and the psychedelic opening visuals of Entergalactic, which suggest at least some degree of visual invention. Scott “Kid Cudi” Mescudi’s animated accompaniment to his new album of the same name maroons viewers in the life of up-and-coming street artist Jabari (voiced by Cudi). Having signed a deal to turn his socially conscious graffiti avatar Mr. Rager into a comic, Jabari moves into an apartment in a New York City depicted in colorful CGI heavily indebted to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
Cudi isn’t listed as writer or director of Entergalactic (though he does get “co-creator” and “story by” credits), but his collaborators replicate his penchant for bringing faux profundity to pedestrian stories and emotions. Jabari, we’re meant to understand, is pulled in multiple directions: His ex-girlfriend (Laura Harrier) is trying to reel him back in, his boys (Ty Dolla $ign and Timothée Chalamet) are giving him questionable advice in between smoke sessions, and the cute photographer next door (Jessica Williams) keeps running into him with the sort of fated cosmic frequency that marks her as The One. He also feels pressure to compromise his depiction of Mr. Rager, because a smoking character who extols such pitiful insights as the city bus system being “the original Uber rideshare” is apparently too radical for the general public.
Entergalactic’s main focus is the romance, which goes through the typical motions of lovers failing to communicate and then sprinting through the rain to the sanctified site of their first date. Of course, it’s not Jabari’s fault that the ladies are all over him. Entergalactic hesitates to depict him in any sort of unsympathetic light, to the point where the Mr. Rager subplot is largely abandoned so that we never see Jabari grapple with the prospect of compromising his art.
Rather than feeling grounded in its everyday struggles, Entergalactic comes across more like a black hole of imagination. A handful of druggy daydreams extol a generic, spacey “power of creativity” reminiscent of commercials for children, and those are the best of the story’s sporadic attempts to take advantage of an animated format. If the character models are initially striking for their painterly shading, they quickly lose their novelty in a procession of dull camera angles indistinguishable from some particularly listless live-action cinematography.
Perhaps the individual parts of Entergalactic might have been more effective if they’d been chopped up into individual music videos. Taken all together, however, they create a mind-numbing experience whose writing and visual stylings remain dispiritingly earthbound.
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I wanted to like it but I just couldn’t sit through fifteen minutes of it without constantly rolling my eyes. Spot on review
I don’t think I’ve ever disagreed with a critical review of a movie this profoundly. Your attempt to nullify the artistic production in this movie is fairly pathetic. This movie was one of the first in this era to really connect with a modern day audience who’s struggles and lifestyles have been failed to be represented in a creative and positive light so far. I can understand the label of a generic story and lackluster depth in character development but that is far form the point of the creative and artistic outlet this movie was.