Escape From Planet Earth

This new animated film has a pretty substandard script.  It's about two alien brothers--one brawny, one brainy--who have to work together when the brawny brother (voiced by Brendan Fraser) is stranded on Earth, believing he doesn’t need his brainy brother’s (Rob Corddry) assistance to fly his spaceship and other help. Unfortunately parents will bring their kids to this and think they come out with a “cooperation” moral, but there is rampant commercialism in the first part of the film.

The brawny brother, Scorch, is beloved by all due to his heroic deeds. His brother, Gary, is a mission control technician who operates Scorch’s spaceship by remote control. I thought this in itself was a stupid premise because it just seems nonsensical to have someone else fly your spaceship for you. But then I saw it needed to be part of the plot so that when Gary refuses to help Scorch, Scorch ultimately gets stranded on an alien planet since he doesn't know how to fly his own ship. Anyway, Gary’s son even admires Scorch over Gary, emanating his braggadocious behavior. Gary gets fed up with being unappreciated, and just when Scorch gets a new mysterious assignment to the “Dark Planet” aka Earth, Gary quits and refuses to help.

What Scorch and everyone else doesn’t know is that instead of saving someone on a secret mission, Scorch has been duped to deliver some priceless energy component to an evil Earth military officer (William Shatner) who intends to use the energy to travel to other worlds to dominate alien races. Scorch and other stranded aliens are forced to work for the military, and once Gary finds out, he gives in to save his brother.

The voice work and jokes are not too fresh. Everything feels like the creators just input the minimum amount of originality in the scripting, character realization and visual effects.  The film chooses a couple of minority actors for some of the roles of aliens locked up in jail (George Lopez, Craig Robinson), unfortunately perpetuating a “minorities in jail” stereotype (and although the comic actor Jane Lynch plays one of these aliens, I guess as a lesbian she too is a minority). The “heroic” aliens are all played by white and whitebread actors more for recognition value among parents than for their voice talent or child-recognizability. Where at first glance one would think Scorch would be the main character, since he is the bolder personality, he disappears for a while to give Gary more screen time as he discusses his issues with his family (Sarah Jessica Parker as the gave-up-my-career-for-the-home wife). 

Fraser and Shatner gave the most personalities to their respective roles, especially Shatner who hammed it up despite being in his 80s (animation is a good fit for him); as the villain he had comic and dramatic elements to his role where others only had one or the other.  The jailed aliens had some of the more loud jokes dependent upon their ethnic stereotypes, but the other voice actors were pretty bland.

I wish this film would have stuck less to repeating old concepts of American culture and lifestyle, and lazy jokes for kids such as underarm farting and slimy aliens, as well as a lot of subconsciously negative depictions of human behavior, and come up with something more new. Admittedly, this is for a young audience, and a very young one at that, although there were some jokes, as in many of these “family” animated films, that are meant for the parental units accompanying these minors.  While these concepts and jokes may be "new" for young audiences, they deserve something a little more witty and inventive.

Also as mentioned earlier, there is a lot of commercialism in the film, both real and fake. The heaviest is the placement of 7-Eleven, as the humans encounter the aliens there first, with posters offering “even bigger gulps.” Scorch also has many sponsors a la race car drivers, and promotes a drink that is “800% sugar, for kids!”  There are also several shots of soda cans that looks very similar to Coca Cola’s iconic red and white can, and I am not sure if I imagined it or not, but a rocket launch tower looked a lot like the signature curvy Coke bottle as well. So I guess the true lesson our kids learn from this movie is “drink more sugar water.”  The visual concepts of this movie too is too cute and candy colored, maxing out one's cones and rods and giving a visual sugar high that unfortunately fits in with the rest of the film.

Other supporting roles are played by Ricky Gervais, Jessica Alba, Sofia Vergara, Steve Zahn, and Chris Parnell--again, largely not a cast that is known to the audience this movie is meant to entertain.