The Plankton Movie Review

I remember hearing about this film leaking about a year ago, long before it actually released, and after the disaster that The Sandy Cheeks Movie was, generally people who saw this early due to the leak thought it was surprisingly good, especially after the terrible last SpongeBob film. So, due to the overall positive reception from leak watchers, I had moderate hope that this film would at least be an alright film, a 6/10. Then, the film officially came out in early 2025 and…. No one talked about it. No one really cared. In fact, I completely forgot about this film until I saw it in my recommended feed on Netflix after watching the original SpongeBob movie. So I watched it earlier, and I must say: If this is your favourite recent Spongebob film, I would completely understand, as this film does have one thing about it that I thought was pretty cool. Especially because, recently, films in the SpongeBob franchise have been in a huge slump of quality, it's not hard at all to get a film which is technically better than the past two SpongeBob films. As, this film proves to me that SpongeBob as a series has really fallen off in quality, and is overall really disappointing, bearing in mind how much people were claiming that it was a huge improvement for the series recently, while in my eyes it’s still bad, but just a bit LESS terrible than The Sandy Cheeks Movie. Let me explain why I think that this film is still a very bad part of the series. 

Firstly, the humor. One of the best parts of the original series and film is butchered here. Probably because Steven Hillenberg was not involved in the production of the film, but they still TRIED to recreate his zany style of humor, but the thing is, it's just not funny. Some of the attempts at jokes in the film I straight up cringed at, actually. Another thing I cringed at, although I also found it entertainingly bad, was the villain song, for an otherwise pretty alright villain, Plankton’s computer wife, Karen. Like, I can’t take you seriously when THAT is your villain song. It’s truly abysmal, and also, lyrically sounds like if you asked ChatGPT to write a villain song for a rogue computer. Although, at least as a villain, Karen wasn’t bad. At points, she reminded me of Mettaton from Undertale, and I made a Kris from Deltarune joke in my head when she ripped out the empathy chip which looked suspiciously like Kris’s soul. The ending of her character is really confusing though, as almost instantly she teams back up with Plankton like nothing happened. Also, we are given genuinely no reason to root for Plankton as a main character. He is genuinely just the same jerk that he is in the original. If you are going to do a spinoff following an antagonist, at least give us something interesting about them, or make them somewhat likeable instead of purely just the same unlikeable villain. Also, this complaint is a bit more trivial, but it still annoyed me when watching the film. The CGI animation doesn’t work. It doesn’t look good at all, and they really should have just kept making 2D animated SpongeBob. The animation here just looks ugly and unappealing.

Also, I feel like they dumbed down basically ALL of the characters to be shells of their beloved characters, instead of being actually likeable, like in the original show. Here, they feel like parodies of themselves, and that makes the film feel like a bad adaptation. Due to the fact that there are no likeable characters in this really, as they have been turned into tropes of characters, instead of actual characters we care for, we have no reason to feel connected to any of the characters, which is never good. For example, SpongeBob himself, yes he was kind of dumb in the original cartoon, but we could excuse that because he was a loveable little goofball. Now, however, he just feels like a dumb and obnoxious character, and that's it. Truly feels like a parody of SpongeBob as a show.

Overall, I feel like The Plankton Movie is a disappointment, and feels like a parody of the beloved show a lot of the time. While I enjoyed the villain, it’s not good enough to save this really mediocre film, and therefore, I wouldn't give this any higher than a

Light 4/10