by Richard
You know, there’s something I really, really love about animated movies meant for the young (or young at mind [or, you know, feeble-minded]). Things are just so very much simpler.
Take, for example, Planet 51, the new Sony animated movie, starring Dwayne Johnson and Justin Long. Johnson voices Chuck, the American astronaut character while Long voices Lem, a (well, to us) alien. Chuck is stranded on the strange planet, the inhabitants of which are (while green and be-antennaed) suffering through a 1950’s amazingly like our own. Full of monster movies and a paranoid fear of the other. Most of them are suffering from this. As well as some overwhelming surrender instincts to authority.
You might not get the joke initially, but Lem, just by his name, is an attempt at funny. See, when the Apollo space craft series began landing on the moon, there were a number of sections. One section stayed in orbit and provided the trip back home. Another section landed on the moon and was originally called the Lunar Excursion Module, pronounced LEM. Yeah, a bit obscure, but at least it was an attempt.
So, here’s the simplicity bit. See, learning a human language is hard enough, but it’s something at least familiar. Something meant to be pronounced by a human mouth using human lungs. An alien language now, that’s something all together different. It might take decades, centuries to decipher an alien language, not to mention the difficulty in having a human speak it.
Here’s where the filmmakers did something so mindboggling it’s almost brilliant. They didn’t want to spend the movie having the astronaut learn a language until he was older and gray. They just had the aliens and the humans speak the same language, English, with no explanation whatsoever. One alien says the astronaut is speaking his language and Chuck accuses the alien of speaking his language. That’s it. Move along. There’s nothing to see here. Let’s get on with the hijinks. I mean, robots aren’t going to piddle oil on their own.
While a passable movie for adults, my youngest little dude really liked this flick. Speed Racer didn’t move around at all during the entire flick. Not bad, then, for him.
Most of the humor consists of watching aliens do things humans do, seeing human attitudes adopted by aliens and watching robots piddle oil when they’re scared. Just about perfect for a fifth-grader.
I’m going to give this movie three (3) dudes out of five. Not bad, but nothing I’d sweat if I missed it in the theater.
Before we
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