Oh, So THAT'S What Happened to The Adventures of Thomas...

To recap, the film starred a kid named Johnny and his dad who escape London during the Blitz to his dad's old childhood home next to a station, where Johnny finds a bunch of drawings of trains with faces. That night, he meets Edward, who has a sign stuck in his wheels, which Johnny gets out. As a thank you, Edward takes the kid on a whirlwind adventure as the film presents its first big "get a load of this" moment: Sodor in this movie is in a parallel dimension with no people. Not even Sir Topham Hatt, who isn't mentioned once in the script. Also, as we learn when we get to Tidmouth Sheds, the engines don't have the traditional grey faces, instead their faces are more mechanical, made to morph on their smokeboxes and grilles. So what this script is trying to say is that the engines are robots. Sodor is now Cybertron...okay. As Edward and Johnny reach Tidmouth Sheds, they meet James, Percy and Emily, alongside new characters like Squeak, a little handcar, and Puffing Billy, the oldest engine on Sodor. Thomas is sitting in his shed catatonic, his coal unlit because he wasn't useful. Script's words, not mine. Johnny relights Thomas' fire and he springs back to life, mistaking the kid for his father. The plot then just goes back and forth between the real world and Sodor for a bit as Johnny tells his dad about Sodor, but as you can probably guess, he doesn't believe him. Gee, I wonder if this'll end with Thomas reuniting with the father and him realising that his adventures on Sodor were real as he, Johnny and Thomas ride off into the sunset. But things take a turn when Smoke, who is apparently the biggest, blackest diesel around, plots a revolution against the steam engines by smelting them all down. At this point, you may be asking "what does any of this have to do with World War II?". Well, my dear reader, that's the hidden allegory of the film. The diesels in this film are essentially Nazis plotting a full on final solution on the steamies. What were these writers smoking and can I have some? Soon, the diesels strike, derailing steam engines and shutting down coaling plants, renderng the steamies useless, leaving it up to Thomas and Johnny to take them down. They meet up with new characters Bertha - a steam plough who may have been the idea for Dustin, I don't know - three French minecarts and four ships, two of which are husband and wife (how the hell does that work?). Soon enough, the big climax boils down to...a relay race. Yep, the big WWII allegory comes to a boil through an Olympic sport. This is when the film delivers its final whopper: Gordon comes in and saves the day! Yeah, the dude just kinda disappeared throughout most of the movie and it's never explained why. The day is saved and...well, you know already.

So your big question with all this is probably "what the hell was that?!", and yeah, there's no better way to put it. A lot of it suffers the same problems faced by Thomas and the Magic Railroad, such as the main character being a human, Thomas feeling inconsequential to the whole thing, and the idea of Sodor being a magical parallel world. But the big thing Magic Railroad has over this is that that film has a lot of reverance for the series. It uses a lot of the same models, it utilises a lot of the show's music, and the characters were still in character. That film made an attempt to recapture what made Thomas so great. The Adventures of Thomas, however, doesn't. It's debatable on whether or not it can even be called a Thomas movie. However, the big takeaway from this script is that, intentional or not, it is hilarious. I mean, it feels less like a film by Shane Acker and more like a film by M. Night Shyamalan, and I mean that in the best way. Everything you see in the script is so scattershot, terrible and borderline insane that by the end, you have no alternative but to laugh at how ridiculous it is. But to its defense, characters like Bertha, Squeak and Puffing Billy do present the nugget of a good idea. If they were utilised in the show, they might have worked (okay, maybe not the husband and wife ships). And with that, the book is now officially closed on The Adventures of Thomas. What's next for Thomas on the big screen? Will Marc Forster pull through? Will they make a new animated feature? I don't know, but one wish I do have for it is simply saying "not like this.".