Riding on an intriguing premise, it’s a shame that Planet 51 shoots for the stars but still manages to end up going nowhere interesting. Excellent texturing and attention to detail on inanimate objects can’t make up for the bland alien character designs and the few bouts of inspired animation don’t drown out the generic jokes. While some of the parodies and references aim for more than the younger crowd, their immature presentation suppresses any adult laughs, and by now even clever mockeries of Star Wars, Alien, and E.T. have gotten old. At least the film promotes the ideas that aliens don’t need pants and that when your brain is removed, you become British.

Lem (Justin Long) is just an average teenager working on getting the girl and furthering his career at the local planetarium - except that he’s an alien. At least to U.S. astronaut Captain Charles T. Baker (Dwayne Johnson – does anyone else find this to be an odd casting choice?) who lands on Lem’s planet hoping for a quick flag plant and a hasty return to earth and his millions of screaming fans. But on this alien planet the media has tagged spacemen as brain-eating, zombie-creating monsters, causing Baker to run for his life and into Lem’s house. Now it’s up to the green native to get the clumsy astronaut back to his spaceship before military dictator General Grawl (Gary Oldman) and mad scientist Professor Kipple (John Cleese) manage to exterminate the Earthly visitor.

Planet 51 is one of the most boring computer animated films to hit the big screen in quite some time. There have been underperforming, poorly written, badly animated, inadequately voiced CG features in the past, but Planet 51 breaks new ground for being an uneventful, slow-moving, unoriginal work of weariness. When the adult jokes are presented in an immature way, and the kid’s humor is occasionally much too grown up, it can only spell mismatched disaster in the entertainment department.

Originally titled Planet One, this dreadful creation is a poor start for Madrid-based Ilion Animation Studios, designed to compete with the likes of Pixar. The celebrity voices and expensive soundtrack may have been a popular choice, but the use of endless homage and song title references become annoying almost immediately. The parodies of the staples of science fiction are to be expected, but the allusions to The Right Stuff and Dust in the Wind seem a bit obscure for the average child, and an entire sequence devoted to duplicating a segment from Singin’ in the Rain is entirely out of place. Sticking to sci-fi elements should have been a guideline. What if humans were the aliens? It’s a decent premise turned into a stale, lifeless and tiresome film.

- The Massie Twins

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