Hola all. Massawyrm here.
It’s hard to imagine a theatrically released animated film worse than PLANET 51. The very epitome of everything -- and I mean EVERYTHING -- that is wrong about modern animated family fare, this tale is most crippled by the fact that it is easily one of the most boring films I’ve seen all year. It was a film so damned dull that you could actively hear all of the kids in the audience shifting in their chairs. One child sitting beside me began playing with the Velcro on her purse to keep herself entertained. Children kicked chairs, parents yawned and every critic in attendance slowly pulled the hair out of their head one by one. The entire experience was awful.
PLANET 51 is a thinly veiled version of ET in reverse. Instead of an adorable alien being left behind on Earth to be befriended by a dorky kid and his strange family, Earth has sent its douchiest astronaut to a distant planet to plant a flag then turn around and come home. But when it turns out the planetary rover (a robot with a dog personality) spends all its time looking at rocks, he shows up to discover a planet of green, SHREK knock offs living in a 1950’s world in which they inexplicably speak English and watch science fiction horror movies about invading humans. Don’t worry – they’re smart enough to MENTION how weird it is that they all speak English and live in the 50’s, so you can totally dismiss it as odd. Discovered by a nerdy kid who realizes the “alien” is friendly and not a threat, he must race around hiding him from an overbearing military and reactionary 50’s stereotypes.
Sadly the only way they can figure out to make this whole thing work is to make the aliens of PLANET 51 even dumber than the frat boy rocket jockey America inexplicably sent as its envoy to another world. The result is an entire cast of completely incompetent, uninteresting characters voiced by people who have ZERO REASON to be in something as incomparably shitty as this. Justin Long is the nerd, Duane “The Rock” Johnson is the Astronaut, Gary Oldman seems to be channeling Hugo Weaving for some unknown reason and Jessica Beil is utterly wasted in a role that could have been voiced by anyone and proves to only be around for her name in the credits. Long and Johnson seem to both be giving it their all despite a complete and utter lack of anything interesting to do, but everyone else seems to be on autopilot (along with everything else in the film.)
Loaded with all the sort of jokes we’re often complaining about, this delivers on the usual farting animals and scatological humor lazy writers are accustomed to falling back on, but even goes so far to grab for a full on dick joke in the form of “That’s a weird place for an antenna.” This doesn’t feel as if it were assembled or constructed as much as it was just throwing shit at the wall to see what would stick. Unfortunately for PLANET 51, nothing does. Everything falls flat. Even the kids failed to laugh at the spate of terrible jokes, making for an eerily quiet theater in which you could hear every cough.
There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to see this. The kids will be bored to tears and you’ll begin thinking about the least valuable part of your body you can gnaw off in order to get out of the theater with your dignity. To be avoided at all costs. End of story.
Until next time friends, smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em.
Massawyrm
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