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#Escape from planet earth movie
When you consider the limitless possibilities of animation, it is shocking how much overlap there is in the tone and content of the films being released, even if a new cartoon movie is unveiled practically monthly. Most of the jokes don't even aim for a laugh, settling for a captive audience and some smiles. Some of Escape's gags register as mildly diverting, like a Slurpee brain freeze whose product placement seems forgivable. Aliens with less B-movie homage and snarkasm. The pointy-eared blue alien race in the foreground bears more than a little resemblance to Megamind, while their trials are like Monsters vs. It's all very standard and, if you're so inclined, derivative. Rainmaker seemingly had twice as much time to work on this as what Pixar pours into one of their films, which makes it pretty tough to excuse or defend Escape's flagrant mediocrity. Meanwhile, Kip and Gary's wife (Sarah Jessica Parker) also become involved and endangered by an unlikely association. The conflict isn't resolved so easily, of course. At the advice of his sympathetic fellow prisoners, a small but diverse mix of slimy, fuzzy, and scaly characters voiced by the likes of Jane Lynch, Craig Robinson, and George Lopez, Gary fears that equipping Shanker with the most powerful weapon in the universe may be the only way to earn freedom for Gary and his brother. You see, although humans have taken the credit, it is aliens who have invented things like search engines, social networks, and computer animation. army general who imprisons intelligent aliens and exploits their brilliant ideas. Shanker (William Shatner), an arrogant U.S. Like Scorch, Gary winds up in the custody of William T. Once Scorch goes missing, Gary journeys to find him, crash-landing in Area 51, narrowly avoiding his aircraft's self-destruction and being apprehended outside a 7-Eleven. Hastily setting out on his next adventure, the fearless Scorch takes off for the Dark Planet, also known as Earth, a place from which no alien has returned alive. Dim-witted but beloved, the corporately-sponsored Scorch is idolized by many, including Gary's young son Kip (Jonathan Morgan Heit). There, Gary Supernova (voiced by Rob Corddry) is a cautious but brilliant mission controller who gets none of the credit for the heroics carried out under his supervision by his astronaut younger brother Scorch (Brendan Fraser). It's tough to believe passions could flare over a family comedy as inoffensive and routine as Escape from Planet Earth. Escape would buck that trend and low expectations to gross $56 million domestically, a fairly respectable sum for a $40 M film and slight improvement over the original Hoodwinked, though the gains were partly offset by a nasty high-profile, confidentially settled lawsuit comparing executives Bob and Harvey Weinstein to The Producers' Bialystock and Bloom. In the seven years it took Escape to reach theaters, Weinstein had released only two additional animated films ( Doogal and the untimely Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Appropriately enough, this project was announced as a Weinstein Company acquisition back in February 2006, mere weeks after Hoodwinked had become the young spin-off studio's first hit. It is the kind of cookie cutter production that peaked in 2006 and faded shortly after once the medium wasn't enough to guarantee profit.
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Those movies are evidently very profitable, but they look like the bottom rung in children's entertainment to someone who has only seen some of their trailers.Įscape from Planet Earth is a sure step up from that impression, but still stands as the most generic CG-animated family comedy we've seen in a while. If the Canadian studio, formerly known as Mainframe Entertainment, is familiar to you, it is by Universal's biannual direct-to-video Barbie films, from 2001's Barbie in The Nutcracker through last September's The Princess and the Popstar. Escape from Planet Earth is one such movie.ĭistributed by ordinarily prestige-driven The Weinstein Company in the United States, Escape is the biggest film to date produced by Vancouver-based Rainmaker Entertainment. Then, every once in a while, we get a film from a smaller, less established animation house. It isn't too hard to keep track of the major active animated film studios, because each has a wide reach, a distinct brand, a signature franchise, and a prominent presence during the busiest moviegoing seasons.Ī small handful of power players are responsible for most of the computer animation released to theaters to reliable success.
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