Race to Witch Mountain (2009)

Race to Witch Mountain arrives in 2009 as a Disney reboot of a franchise that had already been rebooted once, and it conducts itself with the tidy efficiency of a studio that knows exactly which audience it is serving. Dwayne Johnson drives a cab. Two alien teenagers climb in. Government men in black helicopters give chase. There is a mountain, a spaceship, and a secret facility carved from the same NORAD photographs every production designer keeps in a drawer. The film is pleasant, weightless, and entirely content to be so.

The casting is diverse in the way a marketing department understands diversity: a bankable star, a mixed supporting ensemble, a cameo from the original film's child actors for the faithful. Nobody in the film remarks on any of it, which is to its credit and also the reason it registers so faintly on the cultural seismograph. Carla Gugino plays a discredited astrophysicist, a promising figure who is steadily demoted into the male lead's romantic reward. The screenplay offers no argument about gender, race, sexuality, or class. The aliens hail from a dying planet, but the dying planet is a plot engine, not a plea. The villain is a shadowy defense unit, so the film's suspicions run toward secrecy and militarism, not toward capital. The extraterrestrials speak in flat, formal cadences, which is how aliens have spoken since the 1950s and not a statement about anything.

What remains is a breezy chase picture with a little UFO-convention exposition sprinkled over the top. It lectures no one. It means no harm. By the standards of the current moment it is almost aggressively neutral, a film that wants only to move you from one set piece to the next and then sell you a soundtrack. There are worse ambitions. There are also more interesting ones.