140 Character Movie Review – #140RVW
Typically lazy filmmaking by DreamWorks Animation undercuts promising tale and produces familiar result: a cute, funny, unoriginal yawn…
Spoiler-free Movie Review of HOME:
At the risk of being alarmist, I’m here to suggest that animated filmmaking by the major studios is approaching a 1980’s type nadir. Despite some of the fine work done over the past ten years, CG films for kids have once again become a predictable race to the middle. No studio is more culpable than dead-studio-walking DreamWorks Animation, but every studio is guilty of this cynical homogenizing, even the once unassailable Pixar.
Why do all of these pictures have to share the same look? Even when the story is truly original – which is certainly not the case with HOME – they all look alike. The one possible reason for this sameness that I might accept would be that there’s a financial, economies of scale thing going on here. Animation has never been inexpensive, so if they felt compelled to maintain a visual similarity in order to reuse digital assets for cost containment, I’d understand. But the budgets on these films are always north of $100 million, so it doesn’t seem like there’s much recycling happening. (Although there really should be – all reports indicate that despite putting out 31 features to gross $12.5 BILLION, the company is almost completely tapped out.)
I haven’t read the source material, so I’m not sure how much the story itself is derivative and how much is due to the adaptation and execution. Based on the children’s book “The True Meaning of Smekday” by Adam Rex, it’s true that the tale of an alien befriending a human child is hardly going to strike anyone as original. Add the fact that the alien in question is invading, not simply left behind a la ET or Earth To Echo, and you’ve now covered Lilo & Stitch, as well. But it is a kids book, after all, and maybe it doesn’t need to be quite as worried about being compared to a number of movies. Until it becomes a movie itself, of course…
Honestly, despite the over-saturation of advertising for the film, I had no idea that the conceit of HOME was that these adorable aliens were invading Earth and relocating all of the humans to Australia. None. That seems like an intentional oversight in the marketing of the picture, as though they were afraid that audiences would stay away if they realized the cuddly star of the picture is actually somewhat the conqueror at the outset. They may well have called that correctly; with a change of music this could be Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee…
Okay, maybe that’s overstating things, but it’s certainly true that a more truthful summary of HOME would certainly have raised a few eyebrows: On Christmas Day, aliens invade Earth, literally sucking the humans out of their homes to be processed and relocated to camps on another continent while the newcomers completely settle into the properties they have taken by force and reshaping the land to their own design. Meanwhile, our underage protagonist, who is forcibly separated from her single mother, humorously scrounges for supplies and sustenance before fleeing the city in a car she is not licensed to drive with an alien companion who may have doomed her world to demolition…
Y’know, in other hands, that could have made a good black comedy full of gallows humor. But this is DreamWorks, so instead they’ll gloss over the dodgier parts of the premise and serve up a Stranger in a Strange Land / Odd Couple road picture. There must be entire film classes in Hollywood focused entirely on one recipe: displace one character to a new setting, add in one local and sit back and watch hilarity ensue…
The picture is just so predictable it could have come from a similar class in paint-by-numbers storytelling. The film is quite simply lazy.
Oh, I nearly forgot to criticize the music. It’s dreadful. I’m as happy as the next person that the studio has FINALLY centered a story around an African-American girl (from Barbados, actually), but did it have to get a pop-star to voice her? Rihanna isn’t actually bad as a voice actor, but someone needs to have a quick chat with the producers about casting voice talent that can credibly pass for the age of the characters. Between the lack of story clarity and the voice work, it’s quite hard to have any sense of how old the character is supposed to be.
The bigger problem with casting a pop star is that they will invariably want to sing. Rihanna contributed a fistful of toothless and useless pop songs. Hey, everyone has their own sense of taste – I’m not trying to pick apart kids pop music. My beef is that the songs are integrated into the narrative. There’s a scene in all of the trailers where the alien protagonist, Oh (Jim Parsons) is involuntarily compelled to dance by the incredibly catchy music. The problem is that it isn’t catchy. It’s vapid and innocuous Muzak. Re-imagine the climatic scene at the dance in Back to the Future; Marty McFly blowing the minds of the 50’s kids with futuristic 1980’s music – by Toto. It’s kind of like that. Knowing the long lead time on animated film work (and crappy pop music), I’m thoroughly convinced that the animators developed the entire sequence with temp music that actually had some personality. Probably worked better then.
So if the story is unoriginal and the picture is filled with all the familiar narrative peaks and valleys, and all the usual modern CG animated film hallmarks are here (pop culture references, over abundance of star voice talent, de rigueur end scene with all of the characters humorously getting down to pop music), is there anything good about the picture? Sure…
Even if all of the characters have the same basic look as every other feature of this type, the aliens (“the Boov”) are mostly cute. Well, Oh is anyway. If he was the only alien in the film, it would have been much more effective. But I genuinely enjoyed the character.
Nearly 100% of the enjoyment of the feature from an adult perspective comes from Jim Parsons doing the mixed up dialogue of the Boov as he tries to communicate. It’s essentially the same joke for the length of the picture, but it’s usually good for a chuckle even after you’d expect it to be played out.
There’s also a calico cat named Pig. I love calico cats. So there’s that…
Most importantly, though? My daughter loved HOME. So did every kid in the theater. Which is of course the whole point. So, hey, what do I know…
Poster:
Trailer:
Bechdel Test:
Pass
The Representation Test Score: B (9 pts)
(http://therepresentationproject.org/grading-hollywood-the-representation-test/)
| Main Cast | Jim Parsons Oh (voice), Rihanna Gratuity ‘Tip’ Tucci (voice), Steve Martin Captain Smek (voice), Jennifer Lopez Lucy (voice) |
| Rating | PG |
| Release Date | Fri 27 Mar 2015 UTC |
| Director | Tim Johnson |
| Genres | Animation, Adventure, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Sci-Fi |
| Plot | Oh, an alien on the run from his own people, lands on Earth and makes friends with the adventurous Tip, who is on a quest of her own. |
| Poster |  |
| Runtime | 94 |
| Tagline | Worlds Collide |
| Writers | Tom J. Astle (screenplay), Matt Ember (screenplay) |
| Year | 2015 |
