Worse (not merely bad) Movies (review of Planet 51)
We were warned in time to avoid spending hard-earned money seeing Planet 51 in the movie theater. But when we were poking around on Netflix last night, looking for something to watch that we'd missed in theaters, I thought, "How bad could it really be?" After all, my family enjoys watching bad movies together; we're a pretty witty bunch, and an evening of MST3K-like banter is a lot of fun.
The problem is, once in a great while, we run across a movie that isn't simply BAD...it's WORSE.
The opening scenes of Planet 51 are not terrible--we find ourselves on a Whoville-like alien planet in what appears to be their version of the 1950s, and we meet a young man with fairly typical girl problems. So far, so good. But then the Earth astronaut arrives, and everything begins a long and ugly spiral down the toilet, for the audience as well as the main character.
There are many offensive things in this movie--specifically, a long string of crude jokes with any potential humor beaten relentlessly out of them. But the most offensive thing of all is that the human astronaut is an outright insult to NASA. This guy--a self-proclaimed ignoramus who doesn't know anything because he "went to a party school" and has always gotten by on his "charm"--would never have made it INTO the astronaut training program! And yet we're supposed to believe that he's been sent out on a solo mission to what was believed to be an uninhabited planet on the strength of pictures of rocks sent back to Earth by a Rover craft that is programmed to act like a dog? I kept waiting to find out that he wasn't really an astronaut, that he was a janitor or something who ended up on the launch pad by mistake, but no dice.
I get the feeling that what happened here was this: a group of guys (in Spain--yes, the film was made in Spain) got together and decided to create a paper-mache film out of every sci-fi parody they could possibly come up with. Plot...oh, do we need a plot? Does it matter if it has more holes than swiss cheese? No, people will be too busy laughing at the jokes to care!
Except that...we didn't. In fact, during the second half of the movie, in a room with five easily amused people, we were down to about one weak chuckle every 10 minutes. The most frequent response heard: "That's just sad."
Just HOW sad is illustrated by the fact that the next film in our double-feature was a really BAD made-for-Syfy-Channel-by-Asylum movie called Almighty Thor...and we laughed our heads off.
The problem is, once in a great while, we run across a movie that isn't simply BAD...it's WORSE.
The opening scenes of Planet 51 are not terrible--we find ourselves on a Whoville-like alien planet in what appears to be their version of the 1950s, and we meet a young man with fairly typical girl problems. So far, so good. But then the Earth astronaut arrives, and everything begins a long and ugly spiral down the toilet, for the audience as well as the main character.
There are many offensive things in this movie--specifically, a long string of crude jokes with any potential humor beaten relentlessly out of them. But the most offensive thing of all is that the human astronaut is an outright insult to NASA. This guy--a self-proclaimed ignoramus who doesn't know anything because he "went to a party school" and has always gotten by on his "charm"--would never have made it INTO the astronaut training program! And yet we're supposed to believe that he's been sent out on a solo mission to what was believed to be an uninhabited planet on the strength of pictures of rocks sent back to Earth by a Rover craft that is programmed to act like a dog? I kept waiting to find out that he wasn't really an astronaut, that he was a janitor or something who ended up on the launch pad by mistake, but no dice.
I get the feeling that what happened here was this: a group of guys (in Spain--yes, the film was made in Spain) got together and decided to create a paper-mache film out of every sci-fi parody they could possibly come up with. Plot...oh, do we need a plot? Does it matter if it has more holes than swiss cheese? No, people will be too busy laughing at the jokes to care!
Except that...we didn't. In fact, during the second half of the movie, in a room with five easily amused people, we were down to about one weak chuckle every 10 minutes. The most frequent response heard: "That's just sad."
Just HOW sad is illustrated by the fact that the next film in our double-feature was a really BAD made-for-Syfy-Channel-by-Asylum movie called Almighty Thor...and we laughed our heads off.