Asterix Versus Caesar

Watched the Danish dub

Some movies should stay in your nostalgic mind as it always was. A fun classic that you could put on every day of the week, but this one, even this one was one of my least favourite VHS´s to put on for some reason. When something is even uninteresting to you as a kid, you know it's not the best. I must say this is not at all the worst movie I have watched from my childhood, but it´s just not the most interesting thing either.

Obelix falls in love with a young gall girl who sadly is already in love with a young gall. They are kidnapped by the Romans and Asterix and Obelix most set out to rescue them, always being one step behind.

The animation is absolutely stunning! So many wonderful hand drawn backgrounds and great character designs, if not a little bit of their time and comics. There are so many stunning images here like the two young galls in the dessert and every architectural background in Rome looking like a blueprint with a lot of details to them. This is a feast for the eyes and the character animations and designs are all great and has so much character.

It´s fun how a childhood sadness still upsets you till this day. The drowning and dog in sewer scenes still upset me to this day like they did when I was a kid. It is ingrained in my body somehow and I don´t like Asterix and Obelix not being friends! They can be upset and bigger but never be not friends.

That is also a huge complaint I have about this movie. Obelix doesn't really seem like himself. He is dumbed down significantly for my liking ,being a huge dumb child. Asterix is as he should be, clever but also cunning. The village wizard is also not quite right. There are a bit too many character deviances for my liking making some very recognizable characters to me seem nearly unrecognizable.

The other big complaint to me is the overall pacing and plot here. The movie seem so slow and boring and that's a bad thing for a kids movie. The overall plot seems senseless and just events happening without much impact. The ideas are good. Asterix and Obelix enlisting in the Roman army, that's fun! Them fighting in Coliseum, great, a love story, yup, but having them all half-done is just not that fun to watch. It wants to do too many things here in one movie and they don´t have that much of an impact sadly. The love story is barely a thing, the enlisting doesn't really affect anything and that is the word of the day, unimpactful. There are too many plot elements that are just things happening for having something to look at, they barely synch up with the overall mission and the stakes are never really felt here. The urgency should be higher so we the audience care more. Even the coliseum fight seems boring and doesn't have enough screentime. Focusing on maybe 1 or 2 of these aspect might have made the movie more fun and interesting as we then could fully utilize the idea and gimmick used here.

The humour is a bit hit or miss but overall pretty fun. The movie have to really get going though. I would say the movie really first pick up at the enlisting, 20 minutes into the movie, that is a lot of the runtime that just feels a bit boring.

I liked this movie a little less this time around that I remembered but is it bad? No but just rather boring and just not living up to the hights I know this series can be. It is also still a fun nostalgic look no matter what but man this movie just needed a bit more of a second draft and maybe even being 2 entirely different movies, utilizing all the ideas to their full potentials instead of being just a lot of ideas thrown at the wall.