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Planet 51
Sony Pictures // PG // March 9, 2010
List Price: $39.95 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
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I was kinda hooked on Planet 51 at first. I really like the way that 1950s smalltown America has been transplanted to another world...one where everything is round and usually hovering a foot or two off the ground. Think what the suburbs might have looked like in 1955 if Walt Disney had given 'em a Tomorrowland spit-and-polish, and you're somewhere in the ballpark. Other than all that hover-tech and the fact that there are little green men with antennae poking out of their heads, this world
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As much as I like that backdrop and as much as I dig its Bizzaro World take on E.T, Planet 51 coasts way too much on it. Some of the slapstick is cute and charming, sure, and there are oodles of '50s gags about ducking under desks and know-it-all scientists. The movie's even just clever enough to sneak in jabs at Cold War-era paranoia, only instead of the Red Menace, here the question is if your next door neighbor is a zombie slave of a creature from another world. It just feels like Planet 51 is a few really good ideas wrapped around the most generic, paint-by-numbers CG animated movie formula they could dig up. It settles into a really predictable rhythm, to the point where you could almost keep an eye on your watch and say, "...and Action Sequence #3 wraps up here, and cue the Big, Kinda Weepy Emotional Beat in three...two...one..." None of the one-liners are all that memorable. Planet 51 paints Chuck as being a coward with an undeservedly arrogant swagger -- hey, he's People Magazine's 19th sexiest man alive...he can afford to be cocky! -- but he doesn't really beam with any sort of genuine personality either. Ditto for Lem. He's not a character in the sense of...y'know, a character either. He's just there 'cause the plot needs him. The same
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Planet 51 just never ranks more than okay at much of anything it does. There are plenty of action sequences, and although they're all pulled off well enough, they're not much of an adrenaline rush either. None of the jokes really linger. I didn't exactly find myself caught up in any of the characters or pretty much anything that was going on. Sure, Planet 51 kept me smiling, and I dug the really expressive animation, the nods to eight hojillion different movies, and the way it serves up a slightly skewed view of the 1950s. The movie grabs a fairly clever idea and plays it as safe as it possibly could from there...this just feels like a marginally different version of a movie I've watched fifteen or twenty times already. I mean, I don't have anything bad to say about Planet 51. I'm not going to pretend like it was a chore to watch, and if one of my pint-sized relatives asked me to buy 'im a copy as a birthday present, I wouldn't try to talk him out of it or anything. Planet 51 is the sort of movie you pop in, smile a bit over the course of an hour and a half, and then you move on...not a bad way to kill eightysomething minutes but still forgettable, completely disposable entertainment. I don't regret watching Planet 51 but can't really picture myself ever giving the movie another spin, and I guess that's a longwinded way of saying Rent It.
Video
Hey, even if Planet 51 as a movie winds up being kind of an indifferent shrug, at least it looks great in high-def. The scope image is ridiculously crisp and overflowing with detail, and I'm really impressed by how terrific Chuck's reflective visor winds up working in HD. Planet 51 is consistently smooth and clean on Blu-ray, and its bright, candy-colored hues are so vibrant that they leap a couple dozen feet off the screen. If anything, the only gripe I have is that Planet 51 sometimes lets itself get too dominated by greens and grays, and I found myself wishing for a little more variety in the colors as it breezed along. Other than that, though...? Pretty much as perfect as I could hope to see.
Planet 51 is letterboxed to preserve its theatrical aspect ratio of 2.39:1, and its AVC encode spans both layers of this BD-50 disc.
Audio
Planet
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A second DTS-HD Master Audio track is served up in German, and an English audio descriptive service track has also been piled on here. The list of subtitles includes streams in English (traditional and SDH), German, Spanish, and Turkish.
Extras
- Target 51 (HD): Audible gasp! Chuck has managed to plow his way back into space, but he still has to get his landing module back to the ship in one piece. In this game, players'll have to zap any robots or asteroids that come careening his way before he lands safely and soundly in the command module.
- Extended Scenes (3 min.; HD): The first two scenes pal around with Chuck a little longer in Lem's bedroom, including Chucky cringing when he realizes that he's landed on a planet that only has three TV channels. Last to bat is a gag in the comic store where two double-digit IQ soldiers really, really want to be the best mindless zombies they can. A couple of the shots in that last one haven't been fully rendered, but everything else is in sparkling, shiny HD.
- The World of Planet 51 (3 min.; HD): Nope, no voiceovers or anything this time around. "The World..." grabs its virtual camera and spins it around many of Planet 51's different backdrops. Pretty much every key location is showcased, giving viewers a chance to check out some of the attention to detail they might've missed the first time through.
- Life on Planet 51 (12 min.; HD): Once you wade past the overly promotional first few minutes, "Life on Planet 51" serves up lotsa footage of the voice actors at work, and they chat about how they shaped their performances one line at a time with no one else in the cast to play off of. After that, the featurette takes a peek at how Planet 51 came together, including hammering out a roomful of storyboards, designing a round, flying saucer
-centric world, and the animators shooting reference videos of themselves goofing around. It's a decent featurette overall, so don't get thrown off by the first few minutes recapping the plot and churning out so many clips from the movie.
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- Planetarium - The Voice Stars of Planet 51 (3 min.; HD): "Planetarium" is...pretty pointless for anyone who's actually sat through the flick already; sticking to the standard issue trailer-plus-fluffy-interviews formula, Planet 51's cast rattles off the plot in between oodles of excerpts from the movie. This is the sort of thing you'd expect to plug Planet 51 on Nickelodeon in between episodes of Fanboy and Chum Chum or something.
- Planet 51 Music Video Montage (2 min.; HD): Hey, now
- Animation Progression Reels (16 min.; HD): This extra chops up the screen into four quadrants: rough renders, storyboards, animatics, and the polished finished product. Six of Planet 51's biggest sequences are tackled here.
- Shameless Plugs (HD): Last up are a bunch of trailers and promos. There isn't a clip for Planet 51 lurking around anywhere in here, though.
- Animation Progression Reels (16 min.; HD): This extra chops up the screen into four quadrants: rough renders, storyboards, animatics, and the polished finished product. Six of Planet 51's biggest sequences are tackled here.
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Also along for the ride are a DVD of Planet 51 and digital copies for iTunes, Windows Media-powered devices, and (whew!) PSPs. So...yeah. No matter what hardware you're lugging around these days, chances are you can probably give Planet 51 a whirl on it. Oh, and the movie also comes packaged in a glossy, embossed slipcase.
The Final Word
Planet 51 kinda plays like a kids'-size Frosty from Wendy's. Sugary sweet...? Absolutely! It tastes okay going down, sure, but there's not all that much to it either, and it'll be a distant memory within a couple of hours. I mean, I'd say that I like Planet 51, but it's pretty disposable and forgettable. There aren't any particularly clever gags that lodged themselves in my brain, none of the characters are beaming with all that much personality, and the action and ::sniffles!:: emotional beats always feel like they're marching in lockstep with a standard issue CG feature film blueprint. Planet 51 marks the debut of Ilion Animation Studios, and instead of roaring out of the gates with something unique and distinctive to show the world what they can do, they opted instead to play it really, really safe. Likeable enough but completely forgettable, Planet 51 is worth picking up if your kids are clamoring for it, but it's probably better left as a rental. Rent It.
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