Review of Aliens in the Attic (2009) by Chads. — 31 Jul 2009
Eternal enslavement or instantaneous death are the choices offered by the Zarconians upon first contact with the children on a country house roof. These aliens talk a big game, and yet, it takes them an inordinate amount of time to escape the attic.
"Peace is not an option," according to Tazer(Thomas Haden Church), the team leader, but before he and his band of marauding cohorts get down to the business of recovering the hardware buried beneath the house, these aliens start a war, but it's a pretend war, because they're more like playmates than adversaries.
The children come after the Zarconians with paintball guns and rakes, and use fireworks to smoke them out of the vents. Even though they're supposedly the higher intelligence, Tom Pearson(Carter Jenkins), along with his siblings and cousins, fend the creatures off with a counterattack more suited for the realm of make-believe.
Since the aliens are so diminuitive in size, and conspicuously, never attack the parents(a contrivance built into the film's scaled down approach to H.G. Wells), "Aliens in the Attic" should have gone the "Explorers"(the 1985 film starring River Phoenix) route and made the aliens only children masquerading as a scout team.
That would better explain why the young Americans prove to be such formidable opponents to a species who promises imminent death but never delivers(fully mature aliens wouldn't hesitate to kill).
"Aliens in the Attic" is unfocused; it wants to be both "The War of the Worlds" and "E.T."(the subplot between the little girl and Sparks). But despite the hodgepodge of influences, a kernel of intelligence perseveres above the post-modern fray, as the filmmaker, perhaps, is trying to say something about how technology plays too big a role in our lives.
The aliens have all these cool toys, superior mechanics, but they're stupid(not quite "Critters"-stupid). That's why the story hinges around the father(Kevin Nealon) taking his family to the countryside for some fishing.
This review of Aliens in the Attic (2009) was written by Chads. on 31 Jul 2009.
Aliens in the Attic has generally received mixed reviews.
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