Bee Movie (2007)

Saw Bee Movie, which opens with the following bit of misinformation: "According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly" (debunked here).  This is only the opening salvo in a virtual avalanche of bee-related misinformation and mis-truths.  Here are 10 more that I quickly identified, in a bulleted list:

1. Bees cannot speak English
2. Bees do not drive little cars in their hive
3. Beehives do not have little roads inside of them for little cars to drive upon
4. Beehives do not have whimsical honey factories, involving buckets, and conveyer belts, and taffy-pulling machines
5. Bees do not collect nectar via a gun called a "nectar collector"
6. A travelling arc does not move up a bee's antennae like a Jacob's ladder when they are electrocuted
7. Bees do not wear little sweaters
8. Bees cannot use an emery board to surf on flushing toilet water
9. When injured, bees do not need an intravenous honey drip
10. There has in fact been no record of a woman in New York dumping her chef boyfriend for a bee ever at all

So, you can see this is not a very realistic movie (and actual bit of bee trivia you wouldn't know from this movie: male bees are for reproduction only, don't leave the queen, and don't have a stinger (so Seinfeld's character is canonically lesbian.))

Ok, moving on to the plot: the main character bee feels oppressed by the nanny state of the hive.  He desires to fly outside of the hive to hunt for nectar (which, again, in real life is not done with a gun) but in the outside world he meets a woman who he talks to, despite bee law being firm about banning this.  The main plot of the story is the romance between the bee and this human woman, intercut with the bee's quest to stop the exploitation of his people by the humans.

The movie is not great.  It's certainly not bad, but very unpolished.  The humans look strange and lumpy, the bees look much better, but there's a strange mix of movie references, and pointless cameos (Ray Liotta voices himself) and strange whimsy.  At one point, they reveal a hive job is to wear a hat with a finger on top to scoop up the last drop of honey, but at another point, the girlfriend's plane explodes when it rams into a cliffside, during the bee's romantic fantasy.  This second joke feels like something out of the sinister humor of Adult Swim, but the former is just whimsical.  Lumpy, uneven.

The plot bumbles along and has its moments but feels over-long, even at 90 minutes.  There's a few moments of odd politics left in there (strong "if people don't need to work, society will collapse" vibes in the final act, plus also the main bee is dissatisfied that everyone enjoys their jobs (???)) and many of the jokes are recognizably joke-shaped, but only inspire an exhalation.

So, DreamWorks went for broke on the marketing budget of this thing, coating the billboards with ads in the hope of gulling a few hopefuls on opening night, and then letting the film sink into obscurity.  Alas, like Shrek before it, the internet caught hold and made those 2016 edits of the film, after it became clear that DreamWorks had no intention of enforcing copyright.  And here we are today.  See it for the memes if you have to (and I had to) because it's not very good on its own.