I can't believe I sat and watched that entire thing. Quite the train wreck. Even for something super fantastical, the story didn't make a lick of sense. The premise could have worked out great and become a Halloween classic with better CGI, a more straight forward story, and better use of the music. Was Is This Scary even used?
Man they just keep on killing MJ again and again. First off they had those fake ass goat vibrato wannabe tracks on the Michael album then that shuffling monstrosity of a hologram and now this. The dude had vaults full of unreleased jams, reels and reels or footage because he filmed every single thing he did and loads of other bits and bobs lying around that they could use so well in order to honour his legacy but nope, they keep on making the worst possible decisions every time.
I just watched this out of morbid curiosity since I didn't know anybody who saw it to summarize it.
The "millennials" description from the DVR is accurate, the basic plot is that
Michael teaches two millennials about the evils of conformity through a fantastical journey to defeat a villain literally named Conformity (did George Lucas write this?) and to follow their dreams of dancing/becoming a DJ instead of being "a nameless and faceless cog at MegaCorp" (direct quote).
Michael transforms into a bat ("Xscape" I think, but I don't know that song, so I'm guessing) to cause the two millennials to bump into one another and come to his This Place Hotel at 777 Jackson Street (both references to the Jacksons). They meet Bubbles the chimp, and travel to an alternate world via a Doctor Who joke ("Human Nature" as elevator music), where Conformity insists that nobody sing or dance, on penalty of being turned into a zombie.
They meet three people (a pumpkin scarecrow ["Dangerous"/"Jam" mash-up], a spider general ["They Don't Care About Us"/something else mash-up] and a cat scientist ["Torture" by the Jacksons]) and use their songs to fight Conformity. When all three are played together, the scarecrow-spider-cat merge to become Michael Jackson ("Thriller") and he defeats Conformity and her zombie forces (who do not perform the "Thriller" dance???) before travelling on to find more millennials to help with Bubbles.
The film was honestly fairly "on-brand" as far as the themes and references.
The romantically linked protagonists are black and white (in the direction that's comfortable for white audiences), the villain is a sexy lady (cf. "Heartbreak Hotel"/"This Place Hotel" by the Jacksons, "Billie Jean", "Dangerous", "Dirty Diana" [the villain's actual theme song], "Blood on the Dance Floor"), and the aforementioned "don't conform to other people's expectations" that forms the overarching plot.
There's references to the Jacksons and Michael's solo career throughout; in addition to those mentioned above, there's a stained glass window of the Dangerous album cover, the glowing tiles from the "Billie Jean" music video, Michael's Motown 25 outfit early on/"Thriller" outfit at the end (the former zombies do perform the "Thriller" dance but who wants to see that), Michael's license plate is I'M BAD, etc.
None of that prevents it from being pretty impressively bad, though. The animation budget is quite clearly "TV special"-tier, very flat and plastic looking throughout with lip-sync glitches all over the place, and Michael himself looks terrible as seen in OP's photo; the writing is perfunctory at best and actively dumb at worst--which is a lot of the time. None of the characters are remotely memorable, the only one whose name I even remember had his name in the title.
The music is predictably the best part of it, and I didn't mind the mash-ups at all, really. I wouldn't really go out of my way to hear them again, but the mash-up of "Dangerous" and "Jam" in particular makes perfect sense.
Ultimately, who is this for? "Kids" is the obvious answer, but there's so many better Halloween specials. Jackson die-hards with kids, then; for the parents, there's the Jackson references to spot, and kids can sit through some real trash. It sure doesn't have the crossover appeal of a Shrek or something, though; for non-Jackson fans there's really nothing here and the references don't really patch over its other problems even if you are one.
I watched it when there was a MythBusters rerun on that I didn't feel like watching and I guess it was a bearable way to kill 45 minutes.
