Planet 51 (2009)

Planet 51 arrives as an international co-production with a Spanish director, a script by an American writer, and a budget of $70 million, which at the time made it the most expensive film ever produced in Spain. Its premise inverts the standard first-contact narrative: a NASA astronaut lands on a planet of green suburbanites living in a facsimile of 1950s America, and is promptly hunted as an invader. General Grawl fears the human will turn the populace into zombies. The townspeople are gripped by paranoia. There is a robot dog named Rover and a comic book store and a ukulele-playing hippie. That the film won a Goya for Best Animated Film while being dismissed in the United States as a curiosity of borrowed nostalgia says something about the market, if not about the movie.

For our purposes, the film offers almost nothing to classify. Its satire points backward, at Cold War conformity and pulp science fiction, not at any contemporary social arrangement. The aliens are green; the casting is not making a point of anything. Neera exists as a crush and a helper, and the screenplay has no interest in interrogating that arrangement. There is no environmental appeal, no economic critique, no challenge to beauty standards, no neurodivergent character, no renegotiation of history. The humor, which critics found to alternate between curious and potentially offensive, is aimed at pop culture and B-movie tropes. Nobody lectures anybody. The film wants to be E.T. in reverse and largely settles for being E.T. in reverse, which is a structural conceit, not a value system.

Two thousand nine. A gentler era for this sort of taxonomy. The picture is amiable, forgettable, and ideologically inert, a pastiche with a spaceship and no thesis. We file it accordingly, with the weariness of an archivist who has opened another box and found only packing material.