Ratchet & Clank (2016)

Ratchet & Clank arrives from 2016, a year in which studios still believed video game adaptations could be willed into profitability through sheer momentum. It could not. The film follows a lombax mechanic and a defective warbot as they join the Galactic Rangers and thwart a scheme to dismantle planets for scrap. The narrative is brisk, weightless, and content to be a Saturday morning cartoon with a theatrical budget. There is no thesis buried here. There is barely a plot.

The voice cast includes Rosario Dawson and Bella Thorne among a serviceable ensemble, though the principals are animated aliens and robots, which limits how much inclusive intent we can attribute. Female Rangers stand in the squad and fire weapons. They are given no arcs and are not asked to be symbols. The villain's homeworld was ruined by pollution, and he now strips other planets for parts, a detail that gestures at ecological anxiety without ever stopping to lecture about it. A mild moral about believing in oneself surfaces near the end and then departs quietly.

Elsewhere the ledger is bare. No queer characters, no racial allegory, no critique of corporate power, no body-positivity messaging, no neurodivergent reading of the defective robot, no historical record in need of revision. The film predates the era in which such things were expected of family entertainment, and it makes no attempt to retroactively join it. A competent, forgotten cartoon that lost money and was reviewed unkindly, it offends no one, instructs no one, and means almost nothing. A quiet zero.