Review

Home

The timorous Oh (voice of Jim Parsons) and Tip (voice of Rihanna) join forces to save the Earth from a hostile takeover in DreamWorks Animation’s Home.
The timorous Oh (voice of Jim Parsons) and Tip (voice of Rihanna) join forces to save the Earth from a hostile takeover in DreamWorks Animation’s Home.

Home, the latest offering from DreamWorks Animation, features a race of space aliens who have mastered hyperspace travel yet possess the emotional and intellectual development of toddlers.

Led by the self-important but cowardly Captain Smek (voice of Steve Martin), the Boov (the singular and the plural are the same) have a long history of taking over planets with more primitive (at least as seen through their beady little eyes) life. They're also astonishingly wasteful: They repeatedly abandon these worlds every time their nemesis, the Gorg, start pursuing them.

Home

85 Cast: (voices of) Jim Parsons, Rihanna, Steve Martin, Jennifer Lopez, Matt Jones, Brian Stepanek, April Lawrence

Director: Tim Johnson

Rating: PG, for mild action and some rude humor

Running time: 94 minutes

Eventually, this leads them to Earth, where they quickly put all human beings into camps that have the look and feel of amusement parks. In the process they wind up breaking up families and putting people into shoddy new houses when the ones they had were perfectly adequate.

Like the rest of his race, Oh (Jim Parsons) is happy about the "favor" he and the other Boov are doing for humanity. Oh gets his name from the fact that everyone else wishes they could ignore him ("Oh, no. Not him!").

While the Boov have made it here, it seems they might actually be less tech savvy than we are. When our lonely anti-hero sends a party invitation shortly after taking over Earth, he actually hits "Send All," causing every single Boov to receive the message. Worse, for some odd reason, the Gorg are also in his contacts. While trying to escape from the authorities and to figure out how to stop the message from reaching unwanted recipients, Oh encounters a girl named Gratuity "Tip" Tucci (moonlighting singer Rihanna), who is desperately trying to find where the Boov have relocated her mother (Jennifer Lopez). The two scramble to find where the older Tucci has been moved before the Boov (and possibly the Gorg) stop them.

The story by Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember (working from Adam Rex's novel The True Meaning of Smekday) is simple, but the two manage to coax quite a bit of humor from the Boov's sometimes arrogant misunderstanding of Earth and its inhabitants.

While space aliens have been part of cinema since at least Georges Melies' 1902 A Trip to the Moon, director Tim Johnson (Antz, Over the Hedge) and the screenwriters manage to find new angles for how extraterrestrials might think and act. One charming touch is that the Boov's moods can easily be determined by how they change color. When Oh is blue, he's sad, and yellow means what you think it might mean.

Gathering of one's courage is one of the movie's themes. While the filmmakers condemn the Boov's cowardice, they never imply violence or revenge is a satisfactory answer.

The voice casting is spot on. As in The Big Bang Theory, Parsons plays a geek, although a far more amiable one than he plays on TV. Rihanna, who sings a lion's share of the songs on the soundtrack, may not be a child, but she has the right blend of spunk and innocence to be believable as Tip.

If space is indeed the final frontier, Home proves there's still a lot to be gained by looking beyond our own atmosphere.

MovieStyle on 03/27/2015

Upcoming Events