Planet 51Planet 51 reviews is an odd entry into the animated feature realm. With
only “fairly cute” and “moderately entertaining” in its arsenal, Planet 51 is
easily overlooked, and I suspect, destined to be forgotten rather quickly. Under
normal circumstances, I believe I would be on board with a general effort of
leaving the film as unnoticed as huge marketing campaigns will allow, but I saw
the movie with my son, and he loved it.
We have to take our insights where we can, and besides being a member of the
target audience, my son (at eight years of age) is rather bright, serious, and
enough of a film critic in his own right that Neil Gaiman blogged about his
reaction to Coraline.
The plot of the movie is decidedly straight-forward, and while eerily similar to
The Iron Giant reviews in general terms, it’s the zany, cutesy
version.
Chuck Baker (Dwayne Johnson) is an astronaut, and he lands his NASA probe on
Planet 51, which he believes is an uninhabited world. Much to his surprise, the
planet is not only populated by green “aliens” in their own version of the ’50s,
but he finds that these are rather xenophobic aliens. Soon the army is out in
full force, the stories of alien mind-control abilities are running wild, and
the chase is on. Chuck’s only hope of escape is in the hands of mild-mannered
teen alien Lem (Justin Long), whose only worry five minutes ago was working up
the nerve to ask out the lovely Neera (Jessica Biel).
It’s General Grawl (Gary Oldman) and Professor Kipple (John Cleese), and their
thoroughly closed-minded fear vs. Chuck, a couple of teen aliens, and Rover the
wonder bot, and time is running out, because Chuck’s ship is going back to
Earth reviews soon, with or without him.
Against a backdrop of a goofed out Happy Days, with floating cars, floating
burgers, and sillified architecture, it’s a slapdash adventure with a few laughs
and a generally fun tone, but with little that stands out as particularly
interesting. There isn’t anything especially bad about it, but it certainly
doesn’t have the fun factor of something like a Shrek reviews or
Madagascar reviews.
It’s hard to imagine the Chuck and Lem action-figures. There isn’t that sort of
fun, and they aren’t the right kind of characters. The level of paranoia, mass
hysteria, and mob mentality thrown out to make the movie’s statements are hardly
above the excuses for plot steps you might see in a Three Stooges sketch. The
love, friendship, and everyman routines are silly, and only avoid being stock
footage from other (poor) films by way of being animated.
But, my son really liked it. He didn’t laugh as much, nor did he seem to be
generally enjoying it as much as any number of other movies, but when we left he
put it on top of almost all of them. He thought it was a lot of fun, but more
importantly, he loved the way the movie was telling its story. He knew, for
example, that the universe was rather bigger than 500 miles across when the
aliens in Planet 51 declared the fact, and he was fascinated by the idea that he
suspected at least some of the aliens knew it was too. Then there was an alien,
and where could an alien come from in a 500 mile universe? When people still
wouldn’t even toy with the idea of a bigger universe, it became a kind of magic
movie to my son. As much as it was funny and wacky that some aliens claimed to
have had their minds taken over, it said something powerful. People are like
this sometimes, this movie is saying… they don’t listen, fear the unknown, judge
others based on looks, say things they know aren’t true… even though this movie
is about aliens, it means real people… that’s so cool.
I’d have written this movie off pretty quickly, and without giving it that much
thought, if it weren’t for my son. For all that I actually try to modify my
perspective as much as I can for any movie, this one was sneakier than usual. It
just wasn’t that funny really, and well… I’d heard it all before. GoodGood
reviews for me, I outsmarted a kid’s movie.
Not all movies for adults have to be Caddyshack reviews or
Stripes reviews, and no one seems to mind the idea. Maybe all kid’s
movies don’t have to be either.
