Movie Reviews

Movie Reviews: Battle for Terra

If the preachy programmers at PBS Kids made a CGI-animated space fantasy, it probably would play something like this "peace good, war bad" morality tale. Well, except for the aerial dogfights, that is. Battle for Terra is not a bad movie, just one that never quite comes to life as more than a bland parable juiced up with some videogame violence.

On a planet populated by big-eyed, noseless, frankly ugly creatures that one IMDb wag has described as "baby Voldemorts," everyone lives in towering plant stalks in nature-nurtured harmony. With mermaid-style flukes instead of legs, they float and "swim" through the air, occasionally using handcrafted flying machines that seem inspired by either DaVinci or prog-rock album cover artist Roger Dean. Like Whos of Whoville, they turn out en masse for gatherings like a "ceremony of life," described as an occasion to "thank life for what it brings." Get a job, hippies!

Evan Rachel Wood is the voice of Mala, a clever schoolgirl of the species who gently questions authority and skips class to go exploring. When human invaders attack and abduct her people, Mala causes one of the marauding ships to crash. Its brutish pilot Jim Stanton (Luke Wilson) is quickly nursed back to health by Mala with the help of Stanton's robot Giddy (David Cross), who looks like WALL-E and sounds like C-3PO. Mala softens Stanton into agreeing to help rescue her captured father from Stanton's mothership, where a genocide-minded general (Brian Cox) is in conflict with cooler heads about whether to wipe out the planet's inhabitants. Seems humanity needs a new home, now that war between Earth and its colonies on Mars and Venus has destroyed all three worlds.

The 3-D version of Battle for Terra requires wearing those annoying glasses that make the movie look darker than in 2-D, and much of the film is not vividly colorful to begin with. The planet is mostly muted colors and shades of gray, while the aliens' skin tone falls somewhere between "putty" and "corpse." The pink humans have a plastic artificiality and stiffness that conflicts with the almost photo-realism of the movie's well-designed mechanical hardware—but heck, even Pixar doesn't do good people. (Battle for Terra was made by Snoot Entertainment and first-time feature director Aristomenis Tsirbas' Menithings Productions.)

Although we don't see any blood and/or guts beyond a few minor scratches, the movie includes lots of scary captures and apparent casualties during some intense attack and battle scenes. That's something to keep in mind if you think your little angels might be especially sensitive. "Love and mercy will triumph over hate and violence," as one character puts it, but an awful lot of airships get blown up on the path to peace.

—James Dawson
04.30.09