Planet 51 | Animation | rated PG (A) | voices of Justin Long, Dwayne Johnson, Jessica Biel, Gary Oldman | 1:31 mins
Little green teenager Lem is, like everyone in the town of Glipforg, is a big fan of the “Humaniac” movie series. With the third enstallment on the way, an actual alien in a NASA space suit with an American flag patch on the arm crash lands onto Planet 51. With the town petrified the human (Dwayne Johnson) will use mind control to turn them into zombies, Lem tries to protect him against a military that wants to dissect the alien species.
Based on the idea that we humans would be the aliens if we crash landed on another planet, Planet 51 is a movie driven by the template of a 50s drive-in monster movie. The aliens in it act just as we usually do with the discovery of an alien race. People freak out, assume evil and mystical powers where they don’t exist, the military gets involved and we, now them, must save the peaceful alien life. Just to emphasize it, Glipforg’s alien town parallel’s our 1950s culture, a setting paid off in a joke about the 60s very late in the film. The 60s, it’s going to be fun.
Planet 51 is not really a family movie, it’s a kid’s movie. One that will not be enjoyed on multiple levels by kids and adults as Pixar and good Disney movies are but one that will most likely only be enjoyed by kids. Both because kids like the kind of pratfalls and lame jokes adults grew out of years ago and because a kid hasn’t seen this type of movie a hundred times already as an adult would have. Because once you get past the role-reversal premise and Planet 51 shifts into it’s action/sci-fi third act it becomes just another save-the-alien-from-the-military movie.
The movie leans more toward the Dreamworks formula for dragging adults into a kids movie with a frequent use of scatological humor, hippie references impossible for a child to get and nostalgic music right on cue. For a kid’s movie, it cannot keep itself from going for the course and inappropriate joke which upsets the entire tone of the thing. And the jokes are bad too. Really bad. Delivered just far enough from the set-up to give you time to think “no, don’t do it”. “Don’t go for the penis as an antenna joke”.
I’m a sucker for animation and Planet 51 does have a smooth, bright, easy on the eyes animation style. But the story and the usual route it goes is exhaustingly tired. The villain is yet another evil military general (Gary Oldman) who goes “too far”, the movie trucks in a “cute sidekick” in the form of a Wall-E-like robot named Rover for some cuteness insurance and Lem has a crush on a neighbor girl (Jessica Biel, but it might as well be anybody). Everything feels cold, slapped on, built by committee. All of the voice acting is undistinct and devoid of personality, anyone could have voiced any of these roles. In a hay day of sophisticated animation for kids and families Planet 51 is certainly the exception to avoid.