Space Chimps
Review by Peter T. Chattaway | posted 7/18/2008
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We just had robots in space (WALL-E), and soon we will have insects in space (Fly Me to the Moon), but for now, thanks to Space Chimps, we have monkeys in space. Can a revival of The Muppet Show's "Pigs in Space" segment be far off?
Alas, Space Chimps isn't exactly up to Pixar's standards in the technical quality or charming characterization departments, and it's so underwhelming on so many levels that it's pretty much guaranteed to be less fun than Fly Me to the Moon, which, no matter how bad it might be (and I haven't seen it yet, so for all I know it might actually be good), will at least have the benefit of being released in 3-D.
HAM III and Houston on the fly
Space Chimps does have its merits, to a point. For one thing, the script, by director Kirk De Micco (who previously co-wrote the talking-zebra movie Racing Stripes) and Robert Moreland (Happily N'Ever After), demonstrates a genuine fondness for the early days of NASA, and the animation is at its most impressive when it replicates the look and feel of rockets blasting off and objects floating in zero gravity.
The story takes as its starting point a real-life chimp named Ham, who became the first hominid to be launched into space way back in 1961. Ham, who died in 1983, is referred to here as Ham I, to distinguish him from his fictitious grandson Ham III (voice of Saturday Night Live's Andy Samberg), a circus performer who capitalizes on his grandfather's fame by getting himself shot out of a cannon and up into the sky on a nightly basis. He does it to bask in the celebrity, but you get the sense he also wants a taste, just a taste, of what it might have been like to reach for the stars.
Luna, HAM III, and Titan
Ham's dreams come true when NASA decides it needs to send some chimps, rather than humans, on a dangerous mission into space. NASA already has some chimps on staff, as it were, but the Senator (Stanley Tucci) who oversees the space program thinks the existing chimps are all nerds and the mission needs a public-relations boost—so he calls on Ham to join the mission and lend his famous name to it, even though Ham has no training in such things and is actually something of a klutz.
The mission itself, however, is where this movie really falls apart. A NASA probe has passed through a wormhole that is remarkably close to Earth, and has landed on a planet on the other side of that wormhole, so now the chimps—including the sensible Luna (Cheryl Hines) and the constantly punning Titan (Patrick Warburton, who is apparently required by law to be in every cartoon ever made)—are being sent to that planet to make sure that it is habitable for Earth-based lifeforms.
But the planet itself is a tacky, fake, excessively cartoonish environment, in sharp contrast to the reasonably realistic depiction of NASA; it is as though the animators, after spending the bulk of their presumably small budget on the Earth-set scenes, decided to settle for something cheap and inexpensive and call it "alien."
Zartog trying to look mean and ugly
And the copied-and-pasted creatures who populate this world aren't much better. In design, they give the impression that the animators scribbled off a few shapes that looked "weird" and "different," but without putting much thought into them. Personality-wise, the bulk of them turn out to be even dumber than they look.
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