Planet 51

Director: Jorge Blanco

Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Jessica Biel, Gary Oldman, John Cleese

Year: 2009

Genre: Animation

Rating:

Cinema-Reader – 7.0
IMDB – 6.0
FilmAffinity – 6.1


Cinema-Reader Synopsis:

All in Planet 51 is completely normal.
Sunny day means BBQ. Ladies take a walk with their dogs and milkman leaves his deliver in the front door every day like clockwork.

However, something is about to change their life and idea about the Universe, above all for Lem, a teenager working in the local planetarium as a junior assistant that is pretty sure the universe is 5000 miles wide; when a space rocket lands on his back garden, bringing big-mouth and pig-headed Captain Charles T. Backer (Dwayne Johnshon) within.

What at the beginning seemed as a pushover space walk for Backer turns into an adventure helped by his new fella Lem to get back on time to the spaceship for the take-off and to runway of General Grawl (Gary Oldman) and a nutty doctor obsessed with extracting brains for scientifically proposes (John Cleese).

Cinema-Reader Review:

Although it has been panned by the critics with such tough reviews as “a lame-brained toon that even kids will recognize as an insipid goof on sci-fi conventions (Variety)”, and I partially agree, but I consider is probably a bit overrated not to acknowledge the fact that the 3D animation is simply terrific.
The script is on Joe Stillman, the mind who brought us both masterpieces like Shreck I and II. I do agree with the point that the script is a little disjointed. Tries to get an easy laugh with references of other movies that labelled this genre like "E.T.", "2001: A Space Odyssey" or "Star Wars".

However I consider that overtakes what we saw in other recently 3D charts like "Cloudy with chances a of meatballs".

Summing up, the first raid on 3D high budgeted animation fulfilled by a Spanish company is simply good.
Is not great because whatever we compare with a Pixar creation tends to have no good ending.
Won’t be remembered in following years because we have already seen "Toy Story", "Shreck", "Monster Inc" or "Wall-E".

Despite of all these, I am happy with the outcome of this “Made in Spain” movie.