Escape from Planet Earth

Escape from Planet Earth is a 2013 Canadian-American 3D computer animated science fiction comedy film produced by Rainmaker Entertainment and distributed by The Weinstein Company in the United States and Alliance Films in Canada, directed by Cal Brunker, with a screenplay which he co-wrote with Bob Barlen. The film was released on February 15, 2013 and earned $74.6 million against a $40 million budget.

Plot
On the planet Baab, dashing astronaut Scorch Supernova (Brendan Fraser) is a national hero and master of daring rescues. However, Scorch does not work alone; his nerdy brother, Gary (Rob Corddry), head of mission control at BASA, often lends quiet, behind-the-scenes support. When a distress signal arrives from a dangerous planet, Scorch ignores Gary's warnings and sets out on a rescue mission. Scorch soon finds himself caught in a trap set by an evil enemy, and it's up to Gary to save him.

Why It Can’t Escape From Planet Earth

 * 1) To start, this movie is a huge carbon copy of the 2009 animated film Planet 51, only with the character species being reversed.


 * Some of the characters can be bland or unlikeable, to begin with;
 * Scorch is an annoying and unlikable jerk who's overly reckless and does not even care about his own brother to the point where he's a Gary Stu towards his planet, Baab.
 * General Shanker is completely obviously weak and forced as the main villain and it makes Lena look like the actual antagonist. He is also basically a humanized version of Grawl from Planet 51.
 * The imprisoned aliens are rather pointless, as they barely do anything in the whole entire movie. And the fact that they had some major potential for the story makes it all the worst given how said potential is completely wasted.

There are several plot holes and inconsistencies:


 * When Gary first met the two humans at 7-Eleven while trying to rescue his brother, they don't seem to understand him, but when they try to find Scorch's ship and meet them at the caravan park, they are suddenly able to talk to them.

Weak humor, with plenty of it being obnoxious fart jokes and the overuse of unnecessary cartoon sound effects that feel out-of-place.
 * Another plot hole is that when the main aliens return to their home planet, Lena is absent for some reason meaning that she might be arrested off-screen.
 * There is also a contradicting plot-hole about the General's motivation for why he wants to erase the alien race, as the three grey aliens working for him killed his father, yet he still has them as his henchman despite clearly being the reason why he lost his father and he actually would've killed them in general because of it though this is explained after Gary and Scorch are saved from falling to their deaths when they started to finally talk about their experience with Shanker and how they weren't big fans of him, but it still doesn't make up for this weird plot-hole.


 * It also featured unnecessary pop-culture references; particularly how Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial are referenced.

Development Hell: The Weinstein Company announced the movie in 2007 and was released 6 years later, mainly due to the movie’s script being re written during production, the $50 million lawsuit between Tony Leech and its distributor, The Weinstein Company in 2011, and firing many of the original crew members of the movie.

Blatant product placement: Especially, there are two scenes at 7-Eleven and the scenes where Doc mentioned that Shanker has made deals with companies such as Apple Inc., Google, Facebook, and Pixar.


 * In fact, the concept of aliens inventing various technology for Shanker to rip-off and sell to humans is considered an insult to mankind.
 * Several sequences seem to serve no reason to be in the film at all, and thus come across as padding and filler. Examples include:

The romance relationships storyline between with Shanker and Lena. In fact, it could be considered by a lot of people to be bestiality, due to both of them being a separate species as Lena is clearly an Alien while Shanker on the other hand is a human, and since some would consider creatures since they do have a lot in common with animals on planet earth, it makes this sub-plot very awkward and comfortable to tolerate overall.

The action scenes are so lame to the point where even the action scenes from Planet 51 are better.
 * A couch gag scene where the prison aliens cause a food fight around the cafeteria.
 * The ending marriage between Scorch and Gabby.
 * A pointless cameo of Simon Cowell, which didn't age well.

Mediocre character designs, with several of them being unoriginal:
 * The alien designs are basically both the aliens from Planet 51 and the titular protagonist from Megamind if they were mashed together.
 * The guys in the hazmat suits very much resemble the CDA agents from Monsters, Inc..
 * Most of the designs for the humans, aside from Shanker, look rather uncanny.


 * Laughable dialogue mainly due to the script being rewritten 17 times, particularly with the overused catchphrase "Scorch Me Baby!".

False advertising: The city (which appears in the theatrical poster and the cover of the DVD release) that the characters are in never appears in the movie. Much like Free Birds, Fly Me To The Moon, and Igor, this movie is somewhat a unoriginal way for Rainmaker Entertainment to start producing animated movies, considering this movie's flaws and bad production history (as mentioned earlier), but unlike Reel FX in which its next movie, The Book Of Life was an improvement over the predecessor, it's next theatrical animated movie in 2016, Ratchet & Clank, which didn't improve too much for Rainmaker Entrainment to make animated movies in general, ended up being its last theatrical animated movie available.
 * In addition to false advertising, the movie title as a whole is misleading too, as despite being called Escape from Planet Earth, most takes place in Area 51 and not anywhere around the planet Earth, which means that the film should've just been called “Escape from Area 51” instead, not just with Planet Earth.

The relationship between both Gary and Scorch is extremely generic and poorly developed, as they always tend to argue with each other in a very cliché way similar to other films, and their chemistry with each other isn't explored enough due to their constant arguing and how unlikable Scorch is, as one of the scenes tries to be very emotional with Gary being in the freezing room as he looks up to a frozen Scorch and says sorry for failing him when in reality he didn't do anything wrong as Scorch was the one who got them into trouble in the first place by going to Earth and getting kidnapped by Area 51, which makes the scene come off as awkward and not very interesting in the slightest. The movie doesn't teach kids any important messages or morals at all, as the only one it teaches is the moral about Scorch and Gary's relationship where "no matter if you don't get on with each other, you still brothers and you still love each other" which that message has been done in many other films before this one and doesn't help that the message is completely contradicted by the poor chemistry between both Scorch and Gary as previously mentioned stated before.
 * It doesn't help that the relationship between them is meant to be one of the film's highlights and signature plot points, but due to how rushed it is, it makes the writing even worse and the film more unbearable to watch.

While most of the voice acting is good and not bad in general, even Ricky Gervais' voice performance as Mr. James Bing (the computer who monitors Gary at BASA) is incredibly wonky, bland and laughable as he sounds very bored out of his mind and doesn't seem to have a lot of energy doing his performance as a talking computer, which the auto tone not really helping out his performance in any favours either, with the robotic voice sounding very minimalistic and washed out at best, and to go along with him using exposition for his performance makes James come off as one of the more forgettable characters in the entire movie.

Some questionable song choices that do not fit the tone in some scenes for the movie, such as "Bom Bom" by Sam and the Womp, and "Watch Your Back" by Zeazy Z which both of them feel out of place in the scenes that they are put in, especially in the scene where Gary is in 7-Eleven trying to hide from the humans as one of the more unsuited terms from “Watch Your Back” itself can literally heard in the scene playing in the background, which, of course, is the swear word "penis", Keep that in mind, Which is extremely too inappropriate and suggestive for a PG-rated animated movie.

The movie can be rather cruel-hearted at times when it comes to the relationship with the characters, as they tend to act like jerks to each other and come off as a bit unlikable at times, with the biggest examples being the scene where Gary tells Kip to go to his room for interrupting him when all the little guy was doing is coming up with a plan to save Scorch since he's the nephew of the famous Supermodel from Baab and he loves him a lot and it doesn't help that all Gary was doing by that time was messing on the touchscreen and that's it, and the reason for Gary grounding Kip was rather unjustifiable and mean-spirited which is rather out-of-character for him to do that.

This movie has easily some of the most sloppiest pacing in any animated movie to date, as some moments tend to drag on for too long or are way too fast paced and end very quickly giving the movie very little time to breath when it comes to it's synopsis, and despite the movie running at 89 Minutes long, it feels a lot shorter than that due to the awful pacing and overall lack of focus on the core structure of the plot in general.

It fails to have any kind of charm or heart to it at all, since the writing is so bad that it makes the movie fall flat when it comes to the potential it could've had if it didn't go through a horrendous production and it was given to people who would care for the project and give some love, which it didn't.

Wasted direction from Cal Brunker, who would later direct Paw Patrol: The Movie which was one of the best movie adaptions of a kids show in a decade and the best movie he directed to date and was a major improvement over this movie as a whole.

Major Nitpick: The movie overuses several story clichés and tropes, such as the scene where Gary talks to "Kip" about the quarrel that they had over Scorch's "death" and sincerely apologises about it, only for it to be the family dog under the blanket and obviously reveals that Kip has escaped from the house, which is a trope overused in other weak animated movies that came out before and after this movie was made, making a scene that could've been emotional but they ruined it just for a cheap joke.
 * It also applies to the relationship with Gary and Scorch as they don't like each other at first until the very end when they run away from Area 51 and go back to Baab which makes the movie extremely predictable and the audience will obviously know what will happen in the near end of the movie made worse by the awful writing that had the script revised seventeen times.

Escape From Planet Earth Qualities

 * 1) Most aspects of the animation is colorful, all thanks to Rainmaker Entertainment.
 * 2) With the sole exception of Ricky Gervais. the voice acting here isn’t too bad.
 * 3) Great soundtrack, composed by Aaron Zigman.
 * 4) * In particular, "Shooting Star" by Owl City, who also worked for Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole ("To the Sky") and Wreck-It Ralph ("When Can I See You Again?"), is actually pretty good.
 * 5) One of the aliens is a nice nod to classic space aliens.
 * 6) There are some funny every now and then, such as a Hazmat guy playing the piano during the food fight scene.
 * 7) While most of the plot is generic, the concept of a prison break from Area 51 is an interesting one, if poorly executed.

Reception
Escape from Planet Earth received generally negative reviews from critics. Based on 43 reviews, the film holds a rotten rating of 35% on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, with an average rating of 4.62/10, but lacks a critical consensus. On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 35 out of 100 based on reviews from 11 critics, with the tagline "generally unfavorable reviews".

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