48. Home
When this movie started I was really worried and instantly annoyed. Like, I’m not sure any other film on this list, even the bottom two below it, has ever made a more terrible first impression than this one did. The start of the film via narration from our protagonist Oh (Jim Parsons) made me want to turn it off.
The film is about an alien race called the Boov who have decided to do a “friendly invasion” of Earth. The film literally begins with them stealing people from their homes and dumping them in Australia in a newly made place called Humantown or Humanville or whatever. The children are all cool with it because there’s theme parks and shit but the adults are understandably miffed that they were just yanked from their lives and forced to live in the fucking outback.
Why are they doing this? Because their glorious, idiot leader played by Steve Martin, named Smek, has decreed that they must in order to survive. See, they’re on the run from a race of aliens called the Gorg. The Gorg have been following them to every new planet they’ve been trying to get to and destroying it.
This all happened after Smek was invited to a Gorg peace treaty talk and ended up getting so scared he ran away… but not before stealing a rock on a pedestal from them. He puts this rock on a staff he calls “The Shusher” because he uses it to whack people and tell them to shut up. You can immediately see where this is going despite the fact that none of the Boov do. They have no idea why the Gorg keep chasing them. They think it’s just because they’re mean.
Anyway, the Boov invade Earth and kick all the humans out of their residences. They all just steal apartments and homes and immediately I’m like “Oh, they’re the bad guys right?” This was before the flashback that showed Smek just stealing the Gorg’s precious rock.
Here’s our protagonist Oh, who got that name from everyone going “Ooooohhh” in frustration whenever he shows up. He's trying to do things that aren’t tailored to the Boov culture like… be friendly and… throw parties and… I dunno, that’s it.
It’s weird because aside from accidentally knocking people over with his balloon full of a couple of carry-on items he doesn’t actually do anything worthy of being that scorned by his people at first. Yet, despite that, he still came off as incredibly fucking annoying. It was insufferable to a very shocking degree. I really just hated his fucking voice.
Add that to the fact that he was being so invasive and COULD NOT take no for an answer, insisting he was friends with people who did NOT want to be his friend and were understandably getting upset when he invaded their personal space… it left me with very little sympathy for him at the start.
That turned into outright bewilderment when the plot kicked off after he tries to send an invite to his party to a guy named Kyle (Matt Jones), the only Boov with a normal human name for some reason.
Turns out he had it set to “Send All” which I originally thought meant that he sent it to ALL the Boov on the planet. That would have been weird enough but no apparently the Boov’s circular phone device thing has a “Send All” button that sends messages to every species out in the fucking universe.
My brain almost broke when I saw this. What alien species on the run has a device that has a Send All button next to the regular Send button that can alert the alien species chasing after them of their whereabouts? Even Oh says that’s bad design when he learns of what he did, which I guess was an attempt to play this off as a joke but the entire plot hinges on it so… no. It’s not funny.
Oh is blamed for this, of course, and instantly becomes a fugitive and they try to capture him. As this is happening, a girl named Gratuity "Tip" Tucci (Rihanna) is also trying to run and hide from the aliens. She is on the hunt for her mother who was taken to Australia without her because Tip’s cat named Pig was on her head during the time of the invasion. The scanner scanned Pig instead of Tip and deduced that she “wasn’t human” so it left her behind. This means all the humans were taken to Australia without their pets. The implications of that are fairly anger inducing so it’s best to just ignore it before I get any madder.
Tip and Oh meet inside of a convenience store gas station and decide to team up when Oh discovers her car has broken down and offers to fix it in exchange for helping him escape from his own people. He doesn’t tell her this at first and instead intends to trick her into helping him escape to Antarctica when they really need to go to Paris to reach the central hub of the Boov and access their computers to find out where they took her mother. I’ve been telling you she’s in the Outback of Australia this whole time but these characters don’t know that.
Anyway, the reluctant team up starts from there and it’s done… okay. It’s odd because Oh is such an annoying character at the start and his attempts to trick Tip by lying to her and stealing the car he just fixed for her by turning it into a hover vehicle just made me hate him more.
Over time though something miraculous began to happen. The movie got slightly better.
When it came time for Tip and Oh to bond, it was done in a way that felt more natural then I expected this film to pull off. Granted, it’s because Oh’s so stubborn and stuck in his ways and that’s incredibly annoying still BUT the pushback he had when this was happening made it more believable despite the fact that he never fit in.
He was always the odd one out because he likes the idea of parties and friendship but the Boov don’t do that. They run the fuck away from danger and have a culture that punishes people for making mistakes yet for some reason act as if Oh is the only one who does. I guess because he’s just more open about being a fuck up, I suppose. Still, being baked in his culture is going to make him have push backs about embracing Tip’s ways regardless of how different from his own kind he is so I did appreciate that he didn’t just immediately fold into liking it.
The music is very good. By that I mean the songs on this soundtrack are good. I couldn’t tell you what the usual background music here sounded like but the vocal tracks were stellar. Probably because Tip was voiced by Rihanna. They had a smattering of things to play that fit the mood Rihanna’s voice brings to the table, even if there’s a song playing that isn’t done by her.
The one done by Jennifer Lopez that blares when Oh and Tip finally find Tip’s mother is really good. By this point in the film Oh is no longer super annoying either. He’s come into his own as someone that has the ability to at least be a little bit charming sometimes… which doesn’t sound like much of a compliment but I appreciated it being better than it was at the start at least.
The climax is also really good. When Oh confronts Smek and tells him to his face that he’s a bad leader actually and that embracing being human is a good thing it leads to a genuinely great array of scenes from him returning to Earth after he ran away to help Trip locate her mom to him realizing that the rock Smek stole is actually an egg full of the Grog’s tiny babies that they just want returned.
Yeah, turns out the Grog are close to extinction and Smek stealing it meant he was dooming their entire race. The Grog flying after them to try and take it back was basically an eye for an eye and I cannot blame them. Also turns out that they were tracking the egg this whole time. Oh’s stupid party invitation had nothing to do with why they showed up on Earth. You’d think someone would have asked how they were tracking them to every place they were going before now but… nope.
Anyway I just talked about the only good scenes in the film.
The scene where Oh wins over all the other Boov was expected and appropriate but it also happens way too fast. I only believe that Kyle wants to be Oh’s friend now because the movie has made it clear it’s the kind of movie where that can happen and not because it built up to it happening. It doesn’t. Kyle is tasked with bringing Oh back when he goes awol and it just leads to him getting humiliated and smacked around. It understandably makes him want to stand up to Smek but why would that make him want to be Oh’s friend, even if he did help them escape from the Grog?
The VERY ending of the film annoyed the shit out of me. Oh's like "Imma throw another PART-EEE!" in his horrible, annoying voice and it zooms out to a bunch of aliens coming to the planet for his party. I don't why that infuriated me so much but it did. It felt like I was being talked down to despite not being the target audience for this anymore. I couldn't even tell you why. I just hated it.
Also, Smek is... I dunno. I guess he's not the leader anymore but man it really feels like he got off light here. He shouldn't have been happy in the end is all I'm saying. That guy sucks.
This film has a lot of problems and if it weren’t for Tip and her mother doing everything they could to ground Oh into something resembling anything close to mildly sympathetic sometimes or at least tolerable, I’d have said this film was just straight up horrendous. Instead it's just terrible.
It’s a mess. It’s got a solid enough structure and a few good ideas but the way it gets to where it needs to go was too much of a confusing bumble-fuck of annoyances at the start for it to get off scot-free with what it was doing.
It took a while before it sunk in what this film was really trying to do and while there are parts where it succeeds it only does so a little bit. If anything, the parts where it succeeds make me more frustrated because then I'm wondering why the whole movie couldn't do that.
It'll be too soon if I never have to hear Oh's voice again. Just thinking about the film is making it blast in my skull. Get it out! Somebody help me!
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1 month, 2 weeks ago
31 Mar 2025 22:22 CEST
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