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Asterix: The Mansions of the Gods Movie Review

Asterix: The Mansions of the Gods is a 2014 French animated comedy film directed by Louis Clichy. It’s a pretty solid, but flawed adaptation.

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“They will have to adapt or vanish“

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In an attempt to wipe out the Gaul community, Caesar tries to entice the inhabitants into moving to a luxurious Roman colony and adapting their culture. This movie was based on one of the best volumes in the history of Asterix comics, so adapting it was always going to be difficult. Although I did respect the effort, I did find the movie to be wildly uneven.

First off, this was the first Asterix movie done entirely in CGI instead of the standard hand-drawn approach. The results were a mixed bag. On the one hand, the quality of CGI was surprisingly strong and I particularly admired some of the gorgeous and detailed backgrounds with the titular mansions being stunning to behold.

But on the other hand, this computerized approach led to a film that lacked the charm and simplicity of its predecessors. Gone was the comic book feel of the previous films in favor of an overly modern movie that was also not that well scored. I watched the dub version and I did not like the voices at all, but I do expect that the subbed version is probably much better.

My main issue with this adaptation is its overly modernized take on this particular franchise with some action scenes and gags being too childish, goofy and frenetic. Whenever the film tackled its more mature commentary on how the economy works, it was excellent, but even in those scenes it wasn’t up to the level of sophistication of the original source material.

Dogmatix was so cute, Asterix was quite memorable and Obelix got a couple of funny scenes for himself. I did like Caesar in this movie and I also loved that Roman civilian family, who were genuine scene-stealers. Whenever they were on screen and we followed their numerous misfortunes, the movie reached classic, timeless territory.

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The first half of this The Mansions of the Gods was terrific. It introduced its premise so well and some jokes were wonderfully executed. The second half is where the film became overly hectic, haphazard and not as funny as it was before. The movie just lost a lot of momentum during its rather uninteresting third act.