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
Some of the characters can be bland or unlikeable, to begin with;
 * 1) To start, this movie is a huge rehash of the infamous 2009 animated movie Planet 51, which the former was no good.
 * 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, to make matters worse, TWC fired many of the crew members who worked on the movie.

There is a few blatant product placement in some aspects, such the 7-Eleven scene and where Doc mentioned that Shanker made deals with Apple Inc., Google, Facebook, and even 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 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 seventeen times, particularly "Scorch Me Baby!".

False advertising: The city background (which appears in the theatrical poster and the cover of the DVD release) that the characters are in never appears in the movie. Similar to other animated movies such as Free Birds, Donkey Xote, and Igor, this started Rainmaker Entertainment’s animation career on a sour note, considering of it’s flaws and bad production, even Reel FX shaped up with its following movie in 2014, The Book Of Life, which turned out to an huge improvement over the predecessor, it's next animated movie in 2016, Ratchet & Clank, which didn't improve too much for Rainmaker Entertainment in general, The later said movie ended up being its last animated movie available and to date.
 * Misleading Title: Despite being called Escape from Planet Earth, most takes place in Area 51 and not anywhere around the planet earth, which means that the title should've just been renamed to “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 movies, 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 to 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 lesson 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.

Stunt Casting: While most of the voice acting is good and not bad in general, even Ricky Gervais' voice performance as Mr. James Bing comes off incredibly unoriginal 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 favors either, with the robotic voice sounding very janky and washed out at best, and to go along with him using exposition for his performance makes him as one of the more forgettable characters in the entire movie.

There is some questionable song choices that do not fit some aspects in a few scenes, such as Bom Bom by Sam and the Womp, and Watch Your Back by Zeazy Z, which both of them feel like they were put in the wrong context, 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 unacceptable for a PG-rated animated movie.

The movie tend 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.

Similar to other animated movies such as Rumble, Paws Of Fury: The Legend Of Hank, Hotel Transylvania 4, and The Ice Age Adventures Of Buck Wild, This movie has easily some of the worst pacing compared to the four examples listed above, as some moments tend to drag on forever or way too quick paced and end too early giving the it very little time to breath when it comes to it's synopsis, and despite the movie running at 89 minutes runtime, the pacing feels a lot more like 43 minutes runtime, due to the atrocious pacing and overall lack of focus on the core structure of the summary in general.

It fails to have any kind of charm or heart to it at all, since the writing is so janky 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 came out eight years later after the movie released.

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 apologizing about what happened earlier, 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 animated movies (good or bad) 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. In conclusion, This ended The Weinstein Company’s animation career on a sour note.
 * 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 poor writing that had the script revised seventeen times.

Escape From Planet Earth Qualities

 * 1) Most aspects of the animation is colorful and not bad, 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 from those alien sci fi movies.
 * 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 idea of an alien prison break from Area 51 can interesting, but 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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