It wouldn’t be a “Year of Standards” without the whole Earth is evil gag, right? This is Escape From Planet Earth, a movie that is just plain bad. Horrible writing, bland characters, horrible references and product placement, and in general just plain forgettable. But let’s first recount this movie’s premise to really show why you shouldn’t escape Earth, but the theaters that ran this film.
We have another group of brothers in this movie Gary and Scorch Supernova (played by Rob Corddry and Brendan Fraser respectively) and they are a two-alien team, with Scorch on the ground fighting and Gary in command giving orders, going around the entire galaxy saving the day. This time the two are given a mission to go to the DARK PLANET, aka. obvious Earth joke, but Gary tries to be smart and postpone the mission til they get more intel. However, Scorch doesn’t listen and heads to Earth by himself. After a scene that totally isn’t blatant 7/11 product placement, Scorch is captured by General William Shatner and taken to Area 51. The scrawny Gary follows suit and heads to Earth to find Scorch, gets captured by William Shatner too, and now with the help of a ragtag team of stock super genius aliens must break out of Area 51 and stop the fiendish plans of Shatner.
The writing is horribly cliché from beginning to end, without any semblance of actual character to be found just stock archetypes. Just flip open any archetypal writing textbook and you’ll find one of the many bland 1-dimensional characters. The only real surprise for me was that A) Scorch wasn’t voiced by Patrick Warburton (it’s a total meathead character, that’s totally up Patrick’s alley), B) Ricky Gervais voiced the ship’s computer, which is awesome, and C) Sarah Jessica Parker’s character as the mother and wife of Gary is both underdeveloped and strangely enough the most competent character in the movie. More competent than the wuss Gary that we got stuck with as our main character. Other than that there is the boy, the angry big monster, the jealous brother, the meathead brother, the stoners and many more stock characters who are written in the most standard possible fashion.
Next, it’s time to mention the referencing storm in this movie. Luckily unlike the trailer the movie isn’t constantly whoring itself out to every company possible. Just to 7/11. There are two huge scenes that feature 7/11 at the complete forefront and you can constantly see its logo sprinkled throughout the movie. If you were going to promote and get money from any company why 7/11? Apple didn’t want to be in the movie longer than 10 seconds? Product placement isn’t my hot button though, it’s blatant product placement that annoys me. Just like that god awful Universal Pictures plugin The Cat in The Hat, all the plugs in Escape From Planet Earth do is just stick Escape From Planet Earth to just one instance in the zeitgeist, leaving it to just quickly fade from memory as new commercials and products overshadow the ones featured in this movie.
But you may ask “did I like anything in the movie?” The fact Ricky Gervais was in the movie gave me a smile but honestly and again, really strangely, Scorch and Gary are the only other good things in this movie. I know I just spent a paragraph talking about how stock the two are and I’m definitely not saying they’re good characters. They’re blandly standard with the most cliché dialogue possible. However, their brother dynamic is slightly more intelligently written. There are quiet scenes where each brother gets a chance to humanize himself and speak their true feelings. These scenes were nice and even the meat headed nature of Scorch is downplayed. He’s more the thickheaded hero rather than the meat-headed jock, wanting to do heroic acts even if it’s hazardous to his health. If the story could have refocused on this brother-brother dynamic then I’m sure people could have liked it like how they liked Nani and Lilo from Lilo and Stitch (heavy words I know, but I’ll stand by that at least one person on the writing staff had some idea of what they were doing).
Oh and the animation… it’s from Rainmaker Entertainment the same company behind Reboot, and Beast Wars. That’s the only cool thing though. The animation in the movie was just serviceable and colorful enough to be enjoyable but unlike in Reboot or Beast Wars where the animation was stylized and cool, here it’s just barely worth mentioning. Nothing awful but nothing to write home about.
Wrapping up once again. What were the magic words of this review? Bland, cliché, serviceable, and bad. This was a bad movie. There’s no grey about it and although there were a few glimpses of something cool, this film will quickly just disappear from one’s memory once you finish watching. Kids will find it boring, adults will find it irritating and both will forget about it the moment the credits stop. Escape this trash and don’t watch the movie.
Written by: Taylor “Whyboy” Wyatt
Taylor Wyatt DC Blog 
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