Planet 51
Year:
2009
Directed by:
Jorge Blanco
Directed by:
Javier Abad
Directed by:
Marcos Martinez
Rated:
PG
Country:
United States
Runtime:
1 hr. 31 min.
Production Company:
Ilion Animation
Written by:
Joe Stillman
Starring:
Dwayne ("The Rock") Johnson
Justin Long
Gary Oldman
Jessica Biel
Similar Films:
Want a new take on the alien invasion genre? Look somewhere else.
I imagine the pitch for Planet 51 went something like, “You know those movies about friendly but misunderstood aliens? Well howabout we take that concept, flip it, and make an animated movie about a friendly but misunderstood human landing on an alien planet? It’ll be cute.” Then some exec responded, “Sure, why not. Just make sure you sign someone famous on, like The Rock.” Then the filmmakers got to work on the project, became a little too wrapped up in including all their ideas of what this alien world would be like, and ended up making a movie which, beneath its façade of originality, hides a cookie-cutter story about accepting those who are different from us. Viewers will not go into Planet 51 expecting a groundbreaking film; however, what they will get is something even more generic than they would have thought.
The movie takes place on a happy little alien planet where the mailmen ride bikes, the kids run to the comic book store after school, and the scientific consensus is that the universe is a whopping five hundred miles long (and contains thousands of stars!). Oh yeah, and if there’s anything that entertainment has taught them, it’s that if an alien (what would be an alien from their perspective, that is) ever visited them, it would be a bloodthirsty, mind-controlling monster. This is too bad for NASA’s Captain Charles T. Baker, who, not realizing the planet is inhabited, lands on it to stake a claim for ol’ Uncle Sam and quickly finds himself the victim of a full-scale manhunt. Luckily, a free-thinking little green guy named Lem understands that Baker is friendly and risks being branded a traitor (or worse – a zombie) to help Baker get back to his impounded ship and head home.
A quick glance at the movie would indeed lead one to believe it’s an inverse of your typical alien invasion flick: It may be frightening if even a friendly alien were to show up on our planet, but what would it feel like for one of us to show up on an alien planet? However, that is not the route the movie takes. From the beginning of Planet 51, we follow the aliens as the main characters. Not only that, but their lives are remarkably similar to ours: they have streets, houses, stores, and pets, and they even drive Volkswagens(?). We become familiar enough with them that when a human arrives, we are still in the seat of our home planet being visited by an extra-terrestrial. It’s just that our home planet is one inhabited by little green guys, and the extra-terrestrial is a human.
So, instead of a switching of perspective, the movie takes a more conventional approach and tackles xenophobia. The inhabitants of this planet have convinced themselves that they know everything about the universe and that outsiders are bad (fittingly, their world closely resembles that of 1950s America). The media, unsurprisingly, does nothing but reinforce their fears of the visitor. When Lem is hiding Baker and preparing to show the planet how friendly he is, a newscaster secretly shoots some footage of the astronaut acting out movies like Star Wars and The Terminator. Needless to say, the panic increases when the six o’clock news plays footage of Baker declaring that the Rebels will be crushed by the Empire. From here on, the movie is focused on two things: the narrow-mindedness of the government as it hunts down Baker, and the bravery of Lem as he attempts to help Baker despite the potential ramifications of doing so.
The movie, because of this, is too simplistic to be enjoyable by anyone but the youngest viewers (and even when I saw the film, a five-year-old walked out on it -– ouch). Its message of acceptance is certainly a good one, but it does nothing at all interesting with that moral. If it had placed the audience more in the point of view of Captain Baker, it could have at least presented the concept of Imagine if it was you, but the film has been set up so that Baker is, even to human audience members, the outsider.
But movies aren’t all about ideas: they are foremost about feeling. One need only turn to E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (which this movie makes a brief visual reference to) to see that simple stories about friendly aliens can resonate on deep emotional levels. Unfortunately, Planet 51 lacks feeling even more than it lacks originality. It reaches its emotional peak when Lem gains acceptance from a girl he has had a crush on. Not very impressive, I know.
Anything Planet 51 had going for it in concept is lost in execution and simplicity. Instead of a familiar story with a new point of view, we have a familiar story with an ultimately familiar point of view; the only difference is that the main characters are now green, and the outsider looks like us. If you have a child who has never been exposed to a story about the importance of accepting those who are different from us, by all means let them see Planet 51. They might enjoy it. But, you know, there are a lot of better movies you could show them instead.
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