Asterix in Britain (1986)

Released in 1986, Asterix in Britain is the fifth animated outing for Goscinny and Uderzo's indomitable Gauls, and it arrives with the modest ambition of adapting a well-liked comic book without incident. Asterix and Obelix escort a barrel of magic potion across the Channel to a lone British village still resisting Caesar, encountering fog, warm beer, boiled boar with mint sauce, and a rugby match officiated by a druid. The Phoenician herbs Asterix acquires en route turn out to be tea, which the Britons promptly adopt as a national drink. It is a gag about a hot beverage. Nothing more is claimed for it.

Viewed through the lens of contemporary cultural expectation, the film is a vacuum. The cast is uniformly white and entirely unbothered by the fact. There are no LGBTQ characters, no feminist argument, no racial reckoning, no climate anxiety, no critique of capital, and no neurodivergent arc. Obelix's girth is a running joke about appetite and violence, not a meditation on body acceptance. The Britons are a national stereotype, cheerfully rendered, and the film never pauses to interrogate the stereotype or apologize for it. Rome is an empire to be punched, not a metaphor for structural injustice.

None of this is a failing. The film was made in 1986, comfortably before the vocabulary it lacks had been assembled, and it has no interest in instructing anyone about anything. It wants to be funny for eighty minutes and then stop. It succeeds at the first and honors the second. A score of zero is not a verdict on quality. It is a statement of historical fact. This is a comic adventure about a magic potion, and it would be bewildered to learn that anything else was ever expected of it.

It is, in the end, a film about tea. The sommelier tastes nothing. The glass is clean, the vintage is simply from another cellar entirely, and there is no shame in that. We file it accordingly and move on to the next bottle.

Poured, sniffed, and found to contain no social consciousness whatsoever. A bracing zero, and a perfectly pleasant afternoon.

Asterix in Britain: a Gaulish romp with warm beer, rugby, and not a single lecture to be found. The scoring reflects a film that predates the entire discourse and declines, politely, to participate in it. There is no representation agenda, no identity politics, no environmental sermon, and no economic grievance. There is only a small man with a moustache, a large man with a boar, and a barrel that must reach a village. The classification is complete. The film is innocent of everything currently in fashion, and it seems entirely at peace with that verdict.

Final assessment: zero. The sommelier sets down the glass, makes a small note in the ledger, and reaches for the next bottle. The cellar is long, the evening is longer, and the work continues.

Asterix in Britain is a 1986 French animated film directed by Pino Van Lamsweerde, adapted from the graphic novel by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo. It is the fifth film in the animated Asterix series and forms part of the Asterix and Obelix animated collection. It is a book adaptation and a series continuation, and it is nothing else besides. There is no superhero, no true story, no remake, and no Oscar. The record is complete.

It ends, as these things do, with a banquet. Everyone is fed, nobody is lectured, and the credits roll over a village that has learned nothing about itself. We should all be so fortunate.

Zero. Filed. Next.