To Boldly Flee
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To Boldly Flee is a 2012 comedy film, written and directed by Doug Walker, as his Nostalgia Critic persona. It was made for the fourth anniversary of Channel Awesome, and is a sequel to their previous film, Suburban Knights.
Plot
After the events of Suburban Knights, the Nostalgia Critic is still depressed over Ma-Ti's death. However, he is soon arrested for breaking copyright laws, and a cosmic threat, the "Plot Hole", suddenly appears. It's now up to the Critic to prove his and his friends' innocence and prevent the Plot Hole from destroying the universe.
Why It Boldly Fails
- To put it quite simply, at three and a half hours, the movie is way too long.
- The movie looks really cheap and poorly filmed, even for a low-budget indie film.
- There are numerous continuity errors due to the troubled and amateurish filming, with Rob using the "Plot Hole" as an excuse for these errors.
- Much of the humor falls flat.
- The huge number of pop-culture references feel really lazy and excessive. Heck, many of them are just ripped directly out of other, better films.
- The writing comes off as extremely self-indulgent toward the Nostalgia Critic.
- One of the movie's main plot points: the death of the Critic, was reversed a year later, making the entire thing pointless.
- The movie's production was extremely troubled:
- The Walkers argued with Ed Glaser over the shooting of a scene. Glaser later vowed never to work with them again, and his name was included in the credits against his will.
- The script was only given to the actors right before shooting started, giving them little time to read it. Many didn't know the Nostalgia Critic was going to be killed off.
- Furthermore, the last-minute delivery of the script was due to Doug and Rob arguing over the content of the script.
- The cast and crew were extremely overworked, as they had only a week to shoot the movie.
- A lot of the participants weren't paid, despite contributing financially to the movie.
- The other producers weren't asked for their input in terms of the script, which lead to both Lindsay Ellis (the Nostalgia Chick) and Lewis Lovhaug (Linkara) being uncomfortable with the scene where Linkara's evil robot doppelganger, Mechakara, assimilates her into a parody of 7 of 9, as the script implied that he was raping her off-camera (with Doug not realizing how the scene could come off as offensive).
- During post-production, one of the biggest producers on the site, Noah Antwiler (The Spoony One), had a major meltdown on Twitter, which led to his suspension and eventual departure from Channel Awesome, and with him being one of the main people working on the visual effects, Phelan was given the rest of his effects load, with him receiving little to no communication from the Walkers.
The Only Redeeming Quality
- Some of the actors do actually try and give good performances.
Reception
Critical response
The movie was panned by audiences and those who worked on it. Criticism focused on its overly long runtime, poor humor, and self-indulgent nature.
Six years later, in 2018, many of the participants voiced their grievances about the movie's production and Channel Awesome's management as part of #changethechannel.
Videos
