Our second Into Film Festival screening, this year, was Ice Age Collision Course. This is another 3D computer-animated film from Blue Sky Studios, the producers of The Peanuts Movie.

Film Review

Ice Age Collision Course is the fifth instalment in the Ice Age franchise. It’s been 14 years since the debut of the first film, so, as one might expect, this movie is so far from reality that it couldn’t poke it with a very long stick. This is not a franchise that is going to teach much by way of historical fact, and jumping the shark probably happened 3 films ago. However, if you set serious expectation aside, there’s a great deal of fun, and pop culture references, to enjoy.

The basic premise is that Scrat, the sabre toothed squirrel, chases his acorn into a UFO, flies into space, and accidentally sets a bunch of asteroids on a collision course with Earth. (This is fairly amusing in itself – although it is a rehash of a previous short film, Cosmic Scrat-tastrophe.) Manny, the woolly mammoth, and the rest of The Herd, are taken by surprise and have to work together to avert catastrophe, with the assistance of one-eyed weasel Buck.

The sub-plot centres on Manny and Ellie’s daughter, Peaches, who wants to marry her fiancé Julian and move away from home. The father-daughter relationship, and Manny’s initial reserve towards his future son-in-law, makes for a number of amusing, and touching, family moments.

My younger child was very taken with the Buck character; he’s a bit of a crazy Indiana Jones figure – if Steven Spielberg could have rewritten the Pirates of Penzance as a Barber of Seville acid mashup, with dinosaurs. My elder child preferred the serene Geotopia sequences, and laid-back characters. (For some reason, Brooke, the Geotopian ground sloth, put me in mind of actress Heather Graham’s previous work in The Guru and Judy Moody, although she’s actually played by singer Jessie J.)

The likelihood of Ice Age mammals averting an extinction level asteroid with magnetic crystals, based on the discovery of a hieroglyphic stone prophesy, seems slightly higher than a hapless squirrel using an alien spaceship to wipe out life on Mars. It felt rather appropriate to isolate poor Scrat in space segues for the almost the entire movie, as it was hard to suspend the already tattered shreds of reality for his astronautical endeavours. At least, the rest of The Herd were reasonably running around a familiar landscape, doing semi-believable things.

I’m in two minds about this film. I wouldn’t go out of my way to see it again, but there were enough laugh-out-loud moments to make it sufficiently enjoyable that I wouldn’t avoid watching it again.

Themed Activities

I like using themed resources, to support our Into Film Festival experience. Our usual Film Review Writing Templates, produced an average movie rating of 3.5 out of 5 stars, from both of my kids. Possibly, the humour appeals more to older children?

I found some fun Ice Age Collision Course worksheets, for themed Maths and English puzzles.

img_4372

Ice Age Collision Course worksheets, with a Twinkl film review sneakily tucked at the back.

Some other themed resources that I found, but didn’t use, include Ice Age Collision Course colouring sheets, and In Case of Emergency (ICE) activities, for Grades 1 to 3.

The rest of the day was mostly Duolingo, HelloChinese, Gus on the Go, and Khan Academy. So far, so tired. A la Peregrin Took, in the Lord of the Rings, “And [now] to bed! And [now] to bed!”

Ice Age: Collision Course premiered on June 2016, and was released on July 2016. It is available to pre-order on DVD* at £9.99 GBP and Blu-ray* at £14.99 GBP in the Amazon store. (Prices correct at time of writing.)