Aliens In The Attic
Email Printer friendly version Normal font Large font Reviewed by Paul Byrnes
September 3, 2009
Surprisingly enjoyable animation adventure for kids where the adults are clueless as to what's going on.
Knee-deep and dull-witted but desperate to zap the parents.
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GenreAnimation, AdventureRun Time87 minutesRatedPGCountryUnited StatesDirectorJohn SchultzRatingstars-3half
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MOVIES for maturing kids are big business again. Animal animations have always done well, but now we have high school musicals and the naughty but nice Hannah Montana, queen of a new demographic category, the tweenager - someone not yet 13 who acts like one. These movies have raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in the past few years. Wholesome and sassy are the new pink.
Aliens in the Attic is more of a boy thing, although not exclusively. I'm not quite sure who it's aimed at, but eight- to 12-year-olds might enjoy its raucous sense of comedy. After that, they'll probably be too cool. I found it very cheerful and I'm about as responsive to this genre as that troll in the toilets in the first Harry Potter movie.
The surprise is that the script is so good: satirical, inventive and unsentimental. When a kid has a line like ''Let's go and prune the family tree'', you know it's a cut above normal. The young cast is appealing without being too cute and the action is frequent, energetic and funny. The film reminded me of classics such as Gremlins, The Goonies and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. It's not in the same league, but certainly better than I expected.
The initial story was by Englishman Mark Burton, who worked with Aardman Animations on the Wallace and Gromit movie, and wrote Madagascar. He says he was listening to his own kids playing upstairs with the neighbours, and getting massively overexcited. ''One day I just looked at the shaking ceiling and thought: what if that was a real battle and we didn't know?''
It's a brilliant idea. Kids have always loved adventures where adults remain clueless; the trick is to come up with a reason why no one can tell them what's going on. In this script they invent a neat solution: the aliens have a gizmo that turns adults into zombies whose movements can be controlled with a joystick. The Pearson children discover it doesn't work on kids, so they have to keep the aliens from getting close enough to zap the parents.
This all takes place in a rambling holiday house in rural Michigan (it was actually filmed outside Auckland). Tom Pearson (Carter Jenkins) is 15 and a computer geek; big sister Bethany (Ashley Tisdale) is crazy about her new boyfriend Ricky (Robert Hoffman), a super jock with a flash car. Little sister Hannah (Ashley Boettcher) still believes in fairies, which is why everyone laughs when she tells the adults they are fighting aliens upstairs. The Pearsons are joined for the weekend by their cousins - dashing blond boy-of-action Jake (Austin Butler) and his identical twin brothers, Art and Lee (Henri and Regan Young).
They go up against four Zirkonians, an advance party come to take possesion of Earth, although it's hard to believe these guys could navigate a spaceship, let alone conquer a planet. They're knee-high and dull-witted, although quick on the trigger. They're also computer-generated, but reasonably well integrated with the humanoids.
Most of the comedy here is physical, and superbly timed by director John Schultz. The kids are typical computer game addicts, but those skills actually help them against these critters. The joystick gizmo is the ultimate Game Boy, as one of the mischievous twins observes.
The film has some of the energy and inventiveness of old cartoons - not the sappy Disney ones, but the violent, anarchic Warner Bros ones by Chuck Jones and friends. The alien gizmo device is especially clever - it allows for some wild effects. When Grandma Rose Pearson (Doris Roberts) gets zapped, she goes up against the brainless boyfriend Ricky, who's also been zapped. Imagine an aerial fight in Matrix-time between a white-haired old lady and this super jock, and you get a sense of the film's inspired naughtiness.
