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Planet 51
Hank Sartin reviews Planet 51.
The universe, it seems, is really small. Not, perhaps, the 500 miles across that planetarium worker Lem (Long) asserts, but small enough that Lem’s planet looks like 1950s small-town America as envisioned by Back to the Future. The teens may be green and have antennae, and the cars they cruise in may be hover cars, but otherwise the sensibility of the planet is strictly Eisenhower.
The quality of computer animation has developed at an amazing rate and the technology has spread across the industry, so that Pixar no longer has a monopoly on films that look good. When it comes to developing interesting characters and telling fresh stories, however, Pixar remains head and shoulders above the competition.
The plot twist here—the human is the scary alien from the perspective of these bland middle-class greenies—is more clever than the treatment it’s given. We get a stock story about making friends and not judging people you don’t know, and the characters are absolutely generic, from the blowhard military officer to the know-nothing scientist to the hippie protest singer (apparently the 1960s came early to Planet 51). For the under-eight set, there may be some comfort in the rote plotting, but we’re not sure; at the screening we attended, they seemed a bit restless.
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