A carnival of technology

How two boys worlds apart became the best of friends

Rated PG.

Starring a bunch of people never heard from again, some freaky alien puppets and suits, and a billion corporate sponsors.

Viewed 2005-05-17 by dshea, dcantrell, mimamura, susi, and dane.

What starts out as a modern-day Grapes of Wrath adaption turns it to a whirlwind of plot holes and disjoint scenes. The family is moving from the dustbowl that is Chicago to California because mom has landed a dream job at Sears. Back up a little more to get the aliens to Earth. NASA sent a probe to a planet to apparently collect things. The probe sucks the aliens through its vacuum hose (we learn here that they have no endoskeleton) and starts to malfunction, so it launches itself off the planet and heads back to Earth. OK, so we have aliens on Earth now.

At NASA they manage to break out and run all over the place. Most of them head to the windfarm in Livermore, CA (probably) and the tiny nameless one heads to the other side of suburbia to look for a family. Hilarity ensues.

The acting is mostly absent, but that’s to be expected with kids. It’s obvious the goal of this movie was to promote ice-cold delicious Coca-Cola and hearty nutritious McDonald’s meals. The kids’ lines are forced and timing is off. Not to mention to absolutely scary scene involving the wheelchair kid rolling off a cliff and in to water about 50-100 feet below. This is a family movie? What were they thinking?

Most of the rest of the movie involves fish-out-of-water scenes. They take the alien to McDonald’s where there’s a huge birthday party going on. The alien family goes to the grocery store. And so on.

Some confusing things about the movie… why does moving in to a new house involving using power tools? Not just drills, but saws and such? The alien planet is a wasteland, like Utah, but the tiny alien brings nature in to the house which one would guess is his attempt to make it more like home. But his home didn’t have trees or shrubbery.

I give this movie a 1/10 because it was better than Cat in the Hat, but not by much. Nothing happened and it ended with a giant, “what the hell?”