WALL*E, you've been recycled (insert shocked bleep here).
And Pixar's robotic trash collector isn't alone.
Planet 51, a sub-par CG animated spoof about a world that looks suspiciously like our past, is jammed with original ideas. Problem is, none of them belong to the filmmakers. Rather, they've been liberally lifted from decades of science-fiction movies -- from Star Wars to E.T. to Close Encounters of the Third Kind to 2001 to Alien. All of which, we should add, are infinitely superior to this jokey, unimaginative, strictly-for-kids cartoon.
If not surprising, it is disappointing, considering at the core of the movie -- co-penned by one of the scribes of Shrek -- is a workably novel concept: Transplanting the 1950s B-movie science fiction genre to another world and introducing we humans as the hapless invaders.
Dwayne Johnson voices Chuck, the intruder in question: A somewhat dim astronaut who lands on the titular world, unaware that it's inhabited by green-skinned aliens. What they lack in pants, they make up for in antennas and webbed feet.
This extraterrestrial culture feels awfully familiar. From the films to the music to the idealistic but xenophobic attitudes, they appear to be living their own parallel version of our mid-20th century. To them, Chuck isn't a benign visitor -- he's Godzilla, Mothra or any other B-movie monster: Feared, misunderstood and hunted.
He finds one ally in Lem (Justin Long), a timid nerd and astronomer who scrambles to hide Chuck from sinister military men (one voiced by Gary Oldman) and a mad scientist (John Cleese), who wants to dissect his brain for closer inspection. Rounding out the voice cast is Seann William Scott as Lem's friend, Skiff, and Jessica Biel as Neera, the girl Lem can't muster the courage to ask out. And lest I forget, there is "Rover" -- the aforementioned land explorer who supplies what passes for comic relief. (Rather than save and store an insect he discovers, he squashes it. Get it?)
Kids and the most undiscriminating of older moviegoers might be amused, but in a year that has given us Up, Coraline, Fantastic Mr. Fox and the forthcoming The Princess and the Frog, this simply doesn't have the right stuff.
(This film is rated R)
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