If you know me personally, you'll know that I am a massive Spongebob fan. It is my comfort show, and no one understands this more than my partner Jamie.
So when I was grumpy and over tired this weekend, he organised some yummy food and my comfort character to relax me. We'd not seen Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie and so this had seemed like a perfect opportunity to both break away from something we'd seen 100 times but keep it chill.
Sandy Cheeks is NOT my favourite character. I don't dislike her, but I'm not overly bothered by her either, this isn't like my intense dislike for Patrick as he's a bad friend. So having a movie centred around her wasn't my first thought, but considering Patrick got his own stupid show, and at the time Plankton's move was in production, it seemed right. A Squidward movie could be fun, although I'm thinking a Mr Krabs movie might be slightly limited.
What I'm trying to say is that I didn't have high hopes, but I was willing to watch it anyway. I was both pleasantly surprised while proved right at the same time.
The movie follows Sandy Cheeks as she goes with Spongebob to Texas in order to save Bikini Bottom which has been brutally ripped out from the sea bed and taken to the lab she works for to be experimented on. There was an evil scientist who wanted to be a fish, that guy who plays Kyle who is in a lot of things but always plays someone boring and drippy, and SB being more useless and stupid than usual, it was sad.
I dont know why in the latest movies Spongebob seems to have lost his braincells. I mean the later seasons seem to have the same thing going on but even then he isn't as clumsy or daft, but in both Saving Bikini Bottom and The Plankton Movie, Spongebob becomes nothing more than the unfunny comedy relief. It's a sad thing when this is his universe, he shouldn't be reduced to the idiot. That's Patrick's job. On a deeper level it might be a shift in perspective. The centric characters of these films are meant to be quite smart, so perhaps from their perspective (which is true) Spongebob is just a babbling idiot. I never thought I'd get deep into analysing Spongebob.
My main issue with this movie is not that it was a bit slow, or that we followed a character that I didn't really care about, my issue was that the emphasis was on the human characters and I have no idea who they are. This isn't like the Hoff cameoing in The Spongebob Movie, although at the time I barely knew who he was, I genuinely have no idea who these people are and even after googling them I am none the wiser. They got big reveals and to be honest, way more screen time than they needed or deserved. They weren't funny, they brought nothing to the story aside from dancing and weirdness, and they bored me.
Now this upset me. I love Spongebob, and regardless of the fact it is meant for children, adults are still meant to be able to find a little joy in these things, especially when it is their childhood too. So the fact they started out here with a really good plot and then completely ruined it, gutted me. It was like the first half of the movie was written by someone else and then the last half was AI or something!
Seriously, for the first half of the movie we tracked Bikini Bottom to Texas and fought adversaries and met Sandy's circus family and saw a glimpse into her past. This was good, it was easy to follow, interesting, and inkeeping with Spongebob. The second half when we got to the lab had the following things happen:
The villain gets revealed as a Robot
The villain turns into a fish
Spongebob is cloned while also destroyed
Sandy is revealed as a spy all along
While none of these events are awful on their own, combined they ruined the plot entirely. I liked the villain's motivation believe it or not, to make fish into indestructible pets. It was borderline horrific for a kids film, but how they went about it was beyond daft. Having the big reveal as a robot then having her eaten by a fish to then turn into a fish was random and had it not basically been the end of the movie anyway I'd have turned it off. What should have happened is we should have seen Sandy bond with her family a little bit more, had the reveal as an animated character either new or old (would have been funny if it was Dennis) with a grudge, have them taken down and then the end. Plankton was a far superior movie in terms of offshoots and while the film made me re-evaluate Sandy and grow warmer toward her, it then ruined it all with the second part. Even for a kids film the standard was awful. I guess they thought we'd all have zoned out by then and just did whatever. I really hope the new movie in December does Spongebob justice, especially as they've bagged Mark Hamill for Dutchy.
Overall then, I'm giving Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie a 4/10. It was promising and dare I say it, entertaining to start with, but then it got a bit too ridiculous and ruined the magic of my comfort character. Do Spongebob justice is what I say.
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