I hadn't, until recently, seen Titan A.E. the whole way through. Not a bad movie. I like the hybrid 2D-3D animation style and wish more movies did that besides this, The Iron Giant, and a couple others. The turncoat captain was very abrupt. I welcome a plot twist, and it definitely made the plot interesting, but I felt it came out of the blue. Bluth's movies are weird like that. Most of the time, he smacks you over the head with the villain. [There's no question when you see the Knights of the Round Table in Quest for Camelot who the villain is. The tall imposing guy with hair like Riff Raff from Rocky Horror? Yeah, he's probably the bad guy.] (Edit: Yeah, and that's not a Bluth movie, silly Kyo). Jenner in The Secret of NIMH is less so, but still painfully obvious. But in Titan A.E., the captain turns with nothing to set it up. To his credit, Bluth sets up Preed as the obvious villain and uses him as a red herring, but still.

This seems to lead to a giant plot hole. If the captain was under the employ of the Drej from the beginning, why in the world did we have the battle at the cafeteria at the start of the movie? The Drej were there! Wouldn't it have been way easier to kidnap Cale, take him back to the Drej ship, and extract whatever information they wanted from the ring? Cale doesn't know any better at that point. He doesn't know what the ring does. Instead, the captain gains his trust (and ours), convinces him he has powers, tells him what the ring is all about. He's the one who empowers Cale, basically. And then he turns against him? Huh?

After the plot twist happens, I thought to myself, "These aliens are too clever for their own good!" :)

Still, from the twist comes welcome unpredictability. And it also created a neat mechanic where you wonder how long the members of the captain's crew will go along with it.