The Battle for Terra

What a gip!

A couple months ago when I first saw the trailer to Battle for Terra (originally called just Terra), I swear to god it was a completely different movie then the animated feature I just saw at the AMC in Tyngsboro.

In the trailer I saw, a bunch of animated alien kids are playing in a neighborhood that looks a lot like American suburbia. A mysterious spaceship lands. Everyone is terrified. It turns out the invaders are from, gasp, Earth! It turns out that the humans, for various reasons, need to find a new planet. The story is from the point of view of the benign aliens who are being invaded.

Something weird happened to this movie between the making of that trailer and the release last week. No faux suburbia in sight. Instead the chinless aliens float listless in cloud cities that very reminiscent of Horton Hears a Who (the first of many "borrowings" I noticed in this movie). For fun, the young aliens ride light aircraft in the clouds for fun, skimming past "sky whales".

This feature is the first (I think) entry of Lionsgate into feature-length animation. Lionsgate, as I learned from Sly Stallone on one of his DVDs, really isn't a studio per se, but a distribution umbrella for independent production companies, sort of like United Artists was back in the old days.

That being said, this movie might be taken as evidence of just how hard it is to break into feature animation. It wasn't a very good start.

From the get go, Terra reminded me a lot of last winter's Delgo, a truly independent animated feature production that set the inglorious all-time low mark for a wide release opening, one that may never be eclipsed.

In fact, Terra reminded me a lot of Delgo. Both are about weak-chinned lizardesque alien races who can float or fly, and who are forced into an unwanted war to defend their homeland. What the hell is it with this particular plot premise?

The animation in this movie was certainly far superior to Delgo, but that really didn't matter, because, well, the story just sucked. If I could nominate one recent film to illustrate the point that story matters above everything else, this would be it.

I didn't care about the characters. I didn't care about the young girl alien protagonist. I didn't care about the human fighter pilot who crash lands, and whom she rescues. I didn't care about any of them, which is somewhat odd, considering the story revolves around the possible extinction of the entire human race.

We don't really learn that this is the issue until half way through the film, and you'd think it would make me care about what happened, but it didn't.

The screenplay was just junk, a mish-mash of cliches and recycled pieces of other movies, including Battlestar Gallactica, City of Ember, and Wall-E (almost too obvious a theft given the design of the robot). The climactic fight scene seemed to be cribbed almost word-for-word from the Death Star scene in the first Star Wars movie. To make matters worse, not only did the aliens all look alike, but so did the humans. I couldn't keep anyone straight.

I was the only one in the theater for this last-day matinee, and I was so bored during the climax that I wandered around changing seats, just to amuse myself.

Just like Delgo, the producers of this movie went out and hired a bunch of talented well-known actors for the voices (including Evan Rachel Wood, of whom I am a fan). But it just goes to prove, like I said, that all that doesn't matter if the story sucks.

I could go into detail about what was wrong with the story---the introduction was too accelerated, for example, and the story never bothered to establish what the core motivations of the individual characters were (as opposed to the aliens and humans as a group). I didn't know what made them different from the other characters around them (except for the very tired cliche of having the young alien girl be a fantastic whiz-kid inventor).

But if I spend too much time thinking about why this movie sucked, it will make my head start to spin.

There was moreover some serious weirdness in the subtext, which asserted that humans are predators and probably deserve to die out. That really creeped me out, actually. The alternative is to be like the aliens, I guess, who live a controlled society in harmony with nature but also one of enforced blissful ignorance ruled by "elders" who float around telling the citizens to "move along" and to "stay calm."

And they lived dreadfully ever after. Yucch.