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Giving the edible precipitation an origin robs the plot of its wildly whimsical sense of fantasy. It discards this in favor of a thoroughly likeable character who is struggling to make something of himself. The plot pretty much plays out how one might expect, with a focus on themes of excess and environmental collapse that really should be included in more children's fare if society is ever going to pull out of its current global climate crisis.

As Lockwood deals with suddenly immense popularity and finally being able to do something for people he has been plaguing all these years, he begins to fall in love with a meteorologist for a weather channel voiced by Anna Farris. The love between Lockwood and Sam Sparks is fun, particularly as it follows two quirky characters on their journey through a man-made environmental disaster. Sparks is an interesting character for a kids' movie. She's strikingly intelligent, but afraid to show it for fear of not being accepted. Like so many people, she's far more intelligent than the job she's required to do and she must constantly feign vacuous stupidity in order to get ahead. It's a very clever dynamic to show kids. Anti-intellectualism is another one of those societal problems that we really need to be exposing kids to at a very early age so that they can work through it and make future generations a lot more adaptive. Like the whole environmental aspect that's been added to the film's plot, the additional material loses some of the minimalist simplicity found in the book.

The film is truest to the book when it crams the screen with details. On one level, the film is an endless parade of visual jokes that are aimed specifically at the adults who may be forced to see the film over and over again on home video. From text crawls to ads to posters, there's really A LOT in here. The crowd shots of Times Square are dizzying. There's just so much detail . . . and specific visuals from the book make it into the film, like a restaurant with no roof and my personal favorite: a baseball game that has to be canceled due to apple pie. The fast-paced visuals of the film keep the morals from ever seeming too heavy-handed. This film has been put together by exceedingly competent hands.

The Verdict

Contrary to what's been said elsewhere, statements made about the original book with regards to gluttony, excess and its impact on the environment were largely implied by readers. The book doesn't explicitly show any gluttony. In it, we see a town that isn't necessarily overeating so much as it is enjoying the rather unique weather. Any moral the original book may have had would've probably had more to do with being prepared for things to change, being adaptive and above all, not relying too much on the outside world because everything can change. The movie, by contrast is making a very specific statement about gluttony and excess. It's nice to see it addressed again (we'd seen something similar to this last year in WALL-E, which actually handled the theme much more brilliantly,) but it does rob the book of its more simplistic, much more primal exploration of the nature of fantasy.

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