Fennecritic Presents: Paul
Fennecritic Presents
Paul
Hi there - and welcome to a very-early review of the film “Paul”. Yes, I know its not out for awhile, but yours-truly has moved up in the world of film review and was given a special pre-screening.... just for me! Well.... that’s not entirely true, but I’d like to believe it is. I was selected for a special pre-screening for market research. However, I did get to see the film for free before its available in theaters. Turns out that you can sign up to be considered for such screenings on various websites (I got mine through MovieTickets.com) and.... yeah well... they let you see the movies early (in theaters!)
So I didn’t know all that much about Paul prior to seeing the movie. I knew that it was about an alien trapped on earth and was the newest film starring the dynamic duo of Nick Frost and Simon Pegg (who are also the writers, it turns out). I actually thought Paul (the alien) was going to be played by Simon Pegg (that’s how little I knew about the film prior to seeing it), but it turns out that the alien “Paul” is a CG alien, voice-acted by Seth Rogen.
Anyway, we got to the theater an hour and 45 minutes early anticipating a savage line (they said that they were giving out more tickets than there would be seats available in order to ensure that the theater would be filled, and my friend and I didn’t want to drive to the theater only to be turned away). We ended up getting our tickets, and they weren’t even queuing the line yet, so my friend and I walked around the shopping area that the theater was next to, and checked out some of the stores. When we got back, with an hour remaining, they still weren’t queuing up yet, and so we just stood around near the front so that we’d get first seats when they did start to line people up. Other people seemed to take the cue and lined up right after us (horay for spontaneous order!) So we ended up getting next-to-the-best seats. There was a section roped off for “VIP-patrons”, and I wondered who that would be. Just before the film, three crotchety-looking old people sat down in that row. I assume that these people are critics, and it really made me wonder. You see, the conditions for consideration to be offered tickets for the pre-screen was that you had to fit a certain demographic profile, one of the factors being aged between 20 to 30. I wondered how exactly older people, who were outside of the target demographic, could accurately judge the quality of a film that’s not targeted or intended for them. It seems kind of stupid to have people 2 or 3 times older than the target range passing judgment on a film.
Anyway - so on to the movie!
While Paul is filled with chuckles, I didn’t find it to be a very funny film. I felt that Seth Rogen’s delivery was very weak and a lot of the jokes seemed extremely forced (not to mention his voice was annoying). I never really fell in love with any of the characters. They were all very static and boring, and those who weren’t static and boring were so over-the-top that they lacked believability, so I wasn’t able to empathize at all, even to the extent that I laughed (and got some dirty looks) when one of the main characters died. I simply couldn’t take it seriously. The dialog and story was very weak, and the acting was very shallow. The CG was pretty good on Paul (the alien), but I didn’t like the model that they used. The mouth just seemed wrong, and a green “gray” alien slob just seemed passe and silly. What little CG there was aside from the alien Paul was very weak.
I was a little offended at the morality that they tried to shove down the audience’s throat. The film came off as extremely preachy to me, but not in the usual sense. The film was very pro-drug (Paul is constantly smoking blunts), which seemed forced like they were trying to make him “cool”, but most of all, its the depiction of Americans as gay-hating gun-toting ignorant bible-thumpers that bothered me, and their insistence that the existence of aliens somehow disproves the possibility of a Judeo-Christian god, while rubbing the audience’s face in evolution made me want to roll my eyes. There are so many problems with this argument that they are trying so hard to pass off as “indisputable truth” without any counter-argument that I found the film extremely grating and intellectually bankrupt (right alongside all the butt and fart jokes, I guess - oh yeah, and speaking of that.... the amount of cussing was totally absurd and not even funny). To set the record straight, Judeo-Christian beliefs are not incompatible with the existence of extraterrestrials, or even evolution. Now, I am not a Christian, but I do know a lot about Christianity, unlike most of the ignorant athiest fools out there who don’t even know what Christians believe but denounce them anyway (and often call them “uneducated”, which is often a case-in-point of the pot calling the kettle black), most Christian sects believe in the concept of the Bible as revelation - that is, the words are written by human hands, from visions revealed (hence “revelation”) to them by God. If God showed them images of prokaryots, without a scientific background, how would they describe these images in a way that other people of their day would be able to understand? It would have to be in metaphor, of course. That is - very few people believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible, and aside from a few sects, its the Atheists, not the Theists, that insist on taking the Bible literally word-for-word.
I’m really starting to hate atheists who, one would think that after centuries of religious persecution, wouldn’t be intolerant preachy shitheads once their movement started to gain some momentum. You’d think that because their persecution was so recent that they would remember what it was like for people to hate them for their beliefs, but they’re no different than any religion. Now that they have some power, they go out of their way to demean, scorn, and subjugate other religions. I was hoping that they would have adopted a the more enlightened attitude of the intellectuals that they claim to be, but clearly aren’t, and it saddens me that they seem to have co-opted so much of the media and Hollywood. Why can’t we all just leave eachother alone?
Anyway... back to the movie. Arguably the worst thing about the movie is that Paul has all kinds of inexplicable super powers, such as invisibility (which he has to strip naked to use... obvious and very forced jokes penis commence here et nausium), healing people with his mind (which can reflect the damage onto himself for some unknown and unexplained reason), and transferring vast amounts of ideas via touch. None of these powers are explained except the classic cop-out “through evolution”. These powers are used as a massive crutch, aren’t very funny, and weren’t believable. I think they were trying to make Paul to Sci Fi what Hot Fuzz is to Action movies and Shawn of the Dead is to Zombie movies, by giving him powers of famous aliens throughout film history but it came off as lame. And even worse is that they push the notion that Paul was actually the one who came up with most of the classic Sci-Fi ideas in popular culture.... as if having godlike powers and smoking pot doesn’t try to force us to think he's cool enough already.... It seemed just short of the director popping out of the screen and not-so-subtlely shaking you while desperately shrieking in your face “my character’s cool - YOU MUST love him. PLEASE love him!”
In the end, Paul was predictable and stupid. I’m not usually this harsh with movies, but Paul really didn’t have any redeeming qualities. It was one long cliche from beginning to end (which I suppose is expected if it was intended to be a genre parody, but), poorly-executed, even if an amusing idea. They seemed unable to reconcile the conflicting concepts of Paul as a super-powered hyper-intellect and Paul as “just one of the guys”. Paul really isn’t worth seeing, and I’m glad I didn’t have to pay money to watch it. Two ears way drooped.
Thanks for reading!
- jaspian