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Planet 51 Our rating: Your rating:   Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: PG (for mild sci-fi action and some suggestive humor) Genre: Animated, Comedy, Science Fiction Theater release: November 20, 2009 by TriStar/Sony Pictures Directed by: Jorge Blanco Runtime: 1 hour 31 minutes Cast: Justin Long (Lem), Dwayne Johnson (Captain Charles T. Baker), Seann William Scott (Skiff), Jessica Biel (Neera), Gary Oldman (General Grawl), John Cleese (Professor Kipple) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

An alien lands on our planet. Citizens respond in fear, while the military desperately searches for it with plans to dissect the creature for scientific study. Meanwhile, the alien hides out in suburbia and befriends a local boy, who tries to help the creature find a way back home.

Sounds like the outline for E.T. and numerous other movies, right? Planet 51 follows the formula with one key alteration: This time, man is the alien who finds himself the target of fear and paranoia on another inhabited planet.

It's a simple premise that has intriguing potential—a fish-out-of-water comedy with Star Trek-styled ideals concerning the perils of prejudice and paranoia. Unfortunately, Planet 51 aims low, lazily relying on all-too-familiar clichés from every sci-fi and animated feature you've ever seen.

Lem (voiced by Justin Long) and astronaut Chuck (Dwayne Johnson)

The movie's opening scene is its most clever, depicting a standard '50s sci-fi B-movie—a War of the Worlds-styled monster flick involving a teen couple at "Make-Out Point," the giant one-eyed monster that terrorizes them, and the massive alien warship using disintegrator rays to annihilate the army. But all the main characters are in silhouette; a few minutes later, they're finally lit well enough for us to note the green skin, webbed feet, antennae, and lack of a nose.

These actors are clearly not human—nor are the moviegoers watching. Then we cut to life outside the theater, which resembles '50s suburbia with picket fences, neighborly citizens, and a pristine town square resembling the one in Back to the Future. You'd swear it was Earth—if it weren't for the green-skinned citizens, the friendly dog that looks like the Alien creature, and the fact that it rains rocks instead of water.

Life is certainly familiar on Planet 51, and that's one of the chief problems: It's too familiar. Why has this planet so improbably evolved into a mirror of American culture? I guessed it had something to do with Earth's satellites influencing the planet, but as revealed in the movie, the army has quarantined such probes, so there's no way the alien culture could have observed and mimicked us in that way.

The town square is reminiscent of 'Back to the Future'

Perhaps that's over-thinking a kids' movie, but is it asking too much to transport us to another world, or else to explain the copycat setting? By telling the story from the alien perspective and making their lifestyle so comparable to ours, the similarities end up becoming the running joke, relying on overused pop culture references applied to an alien world, rather than inventiveness. This leads to gags like a photo of an alien actress dressed just like Marilyn Monroe from The Seven Year Itch, a hippie alien driving a floating car modeled after a VW van, and characters slapping hands saying, "Gimme four!"

With the setting reduced to nothing more than a copy of ours, we're stuck with the predictable story of teenager Lem (voiced by Justin Long), who lives with his parents and kid brother while trying to land a prominent job at the local planetarium. Unfortunately, everyone around him has trouble taking astronomy seriously while the movie theaters are packed with a popular sci-fi horror franchise involving alien "Humaniacs."

When a real "alien" like Captain Charles T. Baker (Dwayne Johnson) arrives from Earth—initially believing that he's landed on an uninhabited planet—it's no wonder the locals greet him with fear and paranoia. Lem, of course, meets Baker through happenstance, and reluctantly agrees to help him get back to his ship before the military captures him and removes his brain (because that's what they do, right?).

Neera, voiced by Jessica Biel

The story is thin, the characterizations even thinner. Pixar's Up had audiences crying over an elderly couple in just 10 minutes. Planet 51 labors to make us care about anyone during its 90 minutes.

Baker is too annoying and stupid a caricature to worry about his safe return. Lem is the typical slightly nerdy teen found at the center of movies, his best friend Skiff (Seann William Scott) an even nerdier teen who works at a comic book store. Neera (Jessica Biel) is a bland romantic interest for Lem to gaze longingly at; the fact that Lem actually tries the romantic advice of an alien/astronaut he just met shows how desperate he (and this plot) truly is. With nothing to work with, the voice actors add nothing themselves—casting unknowns would have been equally effective and cheaper.

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