Planet 51: A Flawed But Fun Spoof of Sci-Fi History

All you grown-ups are probably going to have more fun with Planet 51 than your kids will. Kids aren't going to understand why an alien guard reading a girlie mag with their planet's green-skinned version of Marilyn Monroe is funny. Neither will they understand why it's funny that a xenomorph-styled, massive-mawed dog is named Ripley. However, the irony some of them may catch onto is a human from Planet Earth being treated as an alien on this one. This movie struggles with both unoriginality and identifying who exactly it wants its target audience to be, but it reverses the dynamic and then satirizes the history of the science-fiction genre, turning us humans into the aliens and the green-skinned freaks into suburban men and women who think we're terrifying. It often feels like both a history lesson and a critique of the various silly sci-fi tropes we've come up with over the decades. It is cliched, but intentionally so in a charming way that reverses the usual dynamic between humans and aliens before playing with the irony of it all.

Both viewers and critics utterly savaged this movie upon its 2009 release, and because it came out in the same year as the universally loved Up, the competition was as stiff as could be. I fully walked into Planet 51 expecting to hate it, but to my surprise, there was actually a reasonable amount to like here, especially if you're old enough to understand the non-stop pop culture references it makes. This movie is far from revolutionary, but it plays with its spoofing of well-established tropes in a stubborn, remarkably self-aware way; this stubbornness is part of the reason why it suffered on the reviews front. It is an alien-invasion movie in which we as humans are the aliens terrifying the suburban areas of another planet. Sixteen-year-old Lem Korplog is one such alien, and the movie repeatedly emphasizes making him as much like us as possible.

The coming-of-age arc of this movie is a familiar one, but set against a science-fiction backdrop. Apart from the green skin, Lem is the sum of high school boys growing up in America. He's got a crush on Neera, the girl from next door with the blond hair and the two green tentacles shooting out of her head, which I can only assume is seen as very attractive on this planet. Like so many of us, he's also too scared to go and even talk to her, to say nothing about telling her how he actually feels, and when the terrifying alien named Captain Charles T. Barker lands on the planet and goes into hiding in the Korplog household, he and Lem begin to bond over ideas on how Lem might win the heart of this girl. This is a flawed movie, but because it understands what it's like to be young, it's also a charming one.

The space-age feel of this movie is incredibly self-aware, like the 1960s if everyone threatening each other with nuclear annihilation had green skin. All of the aliens inhabiting this movie's strange but shockingly Earth-like planet look exactly like our stereotypes of the mid-1900s predicted they would, and they also act a lot as we did at the time, too - some of them even write protest songs about whatever wars their planet finds itself caught up in. How they all learned English, this movie doesn't bother to explain. However, so many of them are afraid of what would happen if the big, bad humans were to invade their planet and harvest their brains. Others even have their own conspiracy theories about invaders from other worlds that their government might be hiding, and even their military has an aesthetic that reeks of post-World-War-II McCarthyism. It's a clever reversal of the alien-invasion trope, and while many of the pop culture references to the 50s and 60s will probably fly over the kids' heads, older audiences will appreciate them.

This brings me to the biggest problem I have with Planet 51. It has its clever moments, but it's targeted at the wrong audience. Kids will be way too young to understand why this movie's endless references to sci-fi history are funny or meaningful. It works better for me than its 23% on Rotten Tomatoes might suggest, and I understand that humor is subjective, but I can see a lot of kids being confused. The near-endless references in this movie can also grow tiresome when it doesn't scare up enough variety to justify making them anymore, as while this movie knows what it wants to do, it doesn't know who it wants to do it for, and it doesn't know when to stop.

Even if the cliches of this movie are self-aware, they're still cliches, and while I'm tempted to give the movie a higher score on the merits of artistic intent, there's just nothing going on here outside of homage, and a whole lot of it. Planet 51 is a pastiche of other movies and stereotypes, and its identity ultimately amounts to a massive collection of things other movies did first. I get that this movie is a homage to classic science fiction, but it often teeters on the edge of plagiarism in the name of parody. But regardless, what it never becomes is boring, and its sheer knowledge of cinema history is refreshing, even if it would have been better served by a movie aimed at a different audience. This movie knows exactly what it wants to be, even if it doesn't know exactly who it wants to be for.

Planet 51 - 6/10

Leviticus 19:33-34