Review: Heavy Metal 2000

A few weeks ago, I reviewed the 4K home release of Heavy Metal. My love for the original movie had me very interested when I was given the opportunity. Then the Blu-Ray came to my door and I put it in. The only thing I could come up with, ultimately, was “why?” I gave myself some time before tackling Heavy Metal 2000. After finally sitting down to watch this, there is only one thing I can say. It’s a quote from Sherrilyn Kenyon, made more famous by famous doctor, Dr. Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park:

“Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.”

And that’s where I’m at. It’s been roughly 20 years since I watched Heavy Metal 2000, and I’m just confused. It’s not the movie itself. The movie is just fine. It’s not the classic Heavy Metal, but it’s definitely an enjoyable movie to say the least. My problem sits, once again, with releasing two movies over 20 years old, and not doing a single god damn thing to touch up the movie to make it more presentable to a modern audience. Somehow, some way, Heavy Metal 2000 looks worse than classic Heavy Metal. I don’t get why Sony, a company that prides themselves on great equipment for audio and video, to release a movie on Blu-Ray with little to no enhancements at all. There will be a bigger review of the presentation coming next week, but I wanted to nail this one out right now.

That said, Heavy Metal 2000 is actually good, maybe great. The tone and animation style changed drastically from the Don Bluth inspired animation of the original, going for a more modern (for the time) animation style. As for the story, the Kevin Eastman (you know, the guy who co-created Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) penned story is single story instead of the anthology model Heavy Metal had. Personally, I find the story of Heavy Metal 2000 to be easier to follow, mainly because I wasn’t piecing together bits from every single story, which ultimately didn’t really matter until the end of the movie.

Just like with the original, Heavy Metal 2000 suffers from an awful mix, that could have been easily fixed. But again, no enhancements were made with this. The prints were jammed onto the discs and sent out. I’m an audio guy. The fact that I can barely hear any voices over any sound effects or music is a cardinal sin to me. The biggest part of the movie is the dialog. If you can’t hear the movie, the visuals, no matter how good or bad they are, mean literally nothing. On top of that, there’s no way to see if it’s the 5.1 surround sound option or not, because the only English track is that. There’s no stereo track.

Let’s get into the story. The plot of Heavy Metal 2000 revolves around the immortality fluid. Tyler got possessed by the substance that was unearthed at the beginning of the movie, and is driven to find this immortality fluid. This led Tyler to Eden, where he annihilates the inhabitants, save for our main protagonist, Kerrie, and her sister Julie. Julie is left on Eden, while Kerrie is taken as a prisoner…make that sex slave for Tyler.

Meanwhile, Julie and Germain team up to take on Tyler, not really knowing what’s going on. Tyler is harvesting the immortality fluid, and our team back on Eden are trying to catch up to him. Let me say this about their choice in space travel: it’s a freaking flying buzzsaw. I’ll take one of those in my driveway please. As they end up in a space station, it’s kind of hilarious that there’s an ad for the tie in game Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K. 2. And, of course, there’s the sex doll scene, which just made me laugh, because there’s a real doll joke in here.

Julie and Germain run into Tyler and his crew in the spaceport, and Kerrie follows him into a strip club. Kerrie finds him about to rape a waitress, and just unloads a mini gun into him. However, because Tyler is just guzzling that immortality fluid, so he’s as good as new in a few seconds. After Kerrie gets her ass handed to her, Tyler pulls the pins out of Julie’s grenades, and the strip club goes kaboom.

Julie and Germain chase Tyler’s ship to the jump port on the space station, and cause Tyler to crash the both of them on a remote planet called Oroboris. Here, we meet Odin, voiced by THE MAN, Billy Idol! The introduction of Odin marks a rather large lull in the action, which kind of makes the enjoyment kind of suffer. There’s Tyler fighting lizard people to take them over and take them on as a part of his army, and Julie crossing the molten lava river to reach help. Meanwhile, Germain is in the middle of nowhere. As luck would have it, Odin mistakenly brings Julie to where Tyler is, where they witness Tyler taking over the lizard people.

After a failed assassination plot, Odin gets his little rock buddy, Zeek, to grab Julie to get out of dodge. They find Tyler’s ship, where Kerrie is being held and tortured. Julie finds the rest of her people, and gets attacked by the doctor torturing Kerrie. After a short, meaningless fight with that doctor, Julie grabs Kerrie, and they get out of the ship before it blows. That means Tyler only has the vials of immortality fluid, so he sets out to the Holy Land to take the immortality fountain over.

One thing I need to make sure I touch on is the soundtrack. Don’t get me wrong, because I loved the original Heavy Metal‘s soundtrack. But Heavy Metal 2000‘s soundtrack fits like a glove compared to the original. I spent more time rocking out to the soundtrack, especially during this middle part, than I have the original. That is one thing Heavy Metal 2000 will have over the original, for sure.

After Julie gets her wardrobe upgrade, and finds Germain with Kerrie, they see Tyler is making his charge to the Holy Land. By the time Tyler makes it to the Holy Land, he’s down to one vial. The end battle between Julie and Tyler was a fun, but brief watch. But the actual end fight was something that just pissed me off. It was a huge letdown from the rest of the movie, because it was a bait and switch moment. On top of that, the CGI used for the final villain was awful, even for 1999-2000 standards.

Here’s the issue with Heavy Metal 2000 as a movie. When the original hit its stride, it was almost at the right moment. All of the stories came together at the right time, and the crescendo hit. Everything popped. With Heavy Metal 2000, the ending fell flat. The bait and switch killed a lot of the momentum of the story, which should have been easy considering it wasn’t an anthology story. There was a moment where the gates mysteriously opened, but there was no concrete answer as to who. Yes, you can assume who opened the gates, but you need to show it, not leave it up to our imaginations. Also, is the entity that took over Tyler the Loc-Nar? Why was this not expressed?

As for the special features, there’s an interview with Julie Strain, a quick interview with Billy Idol, and some animation tests and comparisons. There was definitely nothing to go nutty over.

Like I said at the beginning of the review, I’m going to go over the full package of the two movies early next week. Heavy Metal 2000 suffered a lot from the lack of love Sony gave this release in regards to some enhancements to the video and audio. So, why was this even released?