Ice Age: Collision Course Parent Guide

In 1988, Don Bluth directed an animated dinosaur movie called The Land Before Time. The production company behind it went on to produce over a dozen films in the series. Blue Sky Studios hasn’t quite reached the double digits with their Ice Age franchise but they are inching steadily closer with this fifth instalment: Ice Age: Collision Course.

However it may be only diehard fans of Sid the sloth (voice by John Leguizamo), Manny the wooly mammoth (voice by Ray Romano) and Diego the saber-tooth tiger (voice by Denis Leary) that will want to sit through this latest endeavor. The production tosses together prehistoric mammals, flying dinosaurs, space ships and a weasel of questionable sanity (voice by Simon Pegg) in what feels like a desperate attempt to squeeze one more script out of this growing cast of characters.

This time the herd discovers a meteor hurtling toward Earth, thanks to Scrat and his obsession with acorns. Now they have to find a way to keep the burning rock from rearranging the planet—a pretty big job for a bunch of antediluvian creatures that have barely mastered writing on stone and managing fire. Like the previous outings, this is a road trip story and their quest takes them to the site of an old meteor crash. Along the way, they encounter a trio of revenge-seeking dinosaurs, a hippy commune that lives inside a youth-preserving geode and an opera singing daredevil. Yet the action bounces so quickly between various storylines and characters that it’s hard to know what the point is. The journey is also punctuated with name-calling and potty jokes, in large part from the two opossum brothers Crash (voice by Sean William Scott) and Eddie (voice by Josh Peck).

Unfortunately, the overabundance of sidelines distract from the usual messages we’ve come to expect from this franchise. The Ice Age films have always had family and friendship at heart. And while some of those families have been a little unconventional, they always learned to pull together when things get tough.

In Collision Course it is Manny who is facing a crisis. He and Ellie’s (voice by Queen Latifah) daughter Peaches (voice by Keke Palmer) is getting married. But Manny has serious doubts about his soon-to-be son-in-law Julian (voice by Adam Devine). It’s a classic Father of the Bride plot. Sadly, what could have been a tender tale about letting your children grow up and move on gets lost in a jumble of detours that often aren’t funny or even entertaining.

The last Ice Age movie, Continental Drift, saw a slump in ticket sales, earning the lowest lifetime gross of the four releases. What waits to be seen is if this galactic adventure can revive the brand, or if these creatures are headed for extinction.

About author

Kerry Bennett

Kerry Bennett is interested in media from both a journalist and parent perspective. Along with authoring articles for several family-oriented publications, she has written for Parent Previews for over 15 years. As a parent herself, she believes parents play a powerful role in teaching media literacy in their homes.