But did you see the hair on Tip?–the delightful short curls that bounced and bopped and swayed with the slightest movement? I don’t think I have ever seen so much attention and love put into a hairstyle in a computer-generated film before. I don’t want to hear any more excuses that “black hair styles” are too hard to animate because the people who worked on Tim Johnson’s Home found a way.
The problem is simply that they spent so much time animating the hairstyle of one of their protagonists that they forgot to devote any energy in making the rest of the film any good. Home is a blithering mess, devoid of internal narrative logic, mired in obnoxious humor, and so poorly paced that its 94 minute run-time legitimately felt like it was over two hours long. But the worst indictment I can give is that the children in the theater with me didn’t seem interested in it: they laughed maybe 3-4 times but spent the majority of the film in awkward silence. The poor young girl sitting further down my row eventually resorted to banging the adjacent empty seat open and closed, open and closed over and over again to entertain herself. I believe that children’s movies shouldn’t be given a free pass on mediocre quality simply because they’re made for children. But I can forgive a number of shortcomings if children are at the very least entertained. But Home couldn’t even manage that.
Instead of emulating their more successful films like Shrek (2001), Kung Fu Panda (2008), and How to Train Your Dragon (2010), DreamWorks seemed content to copy the techniques that made most of their earliest computer generated films so mediocre. The most prominent of these is a marked unwillingness to slow down and pace the story. Much like in the Madagascar films, the characters almost never stop moving or talking and the camera swoops in and about with little rhyme or reason. The action scenes are edited with all of the finesse of a Michael Bay caffeine-and-cocaine orgy. We are almost never given a chance to appreciate the stunning visuals because the film, refusing to establish any kind of tone or atmosphere, zips by them after giving them maybe 20-30 frames worth of screen-time.
It would be polite to say that Home’s story makes no sense. But it would be truthful to say that it’s downright incompetent. See if you can follow along:
An advanced alien race known as the Boov have centered their entire culture on the concept of running away. In their attempts to escape their xenocidal enemies, they invade the earth, relocate all humans to Australia, and take solace in the fact that they are safe at the mere expense of subjugating an entire species. One of their numbers, a disgraced fellow named Oh (Jim Parsons), decides to throw a party one night. But while trying to send an invite to one person, he accidentally sends the invite to the entire galaxy with explicit directions on how to get to earth. Oh goes on the run where he eventually meets Tip. Tip is the aforementioned young lady with the beautiful curls who, for such a stupid reason that I won’t elaborate on it here, avoided the “relocation” and is currently looking for her mother. She eventually forms an alliance with Oh to help find her mother in exchange for helping him escape his justifiably furious species. Along the way they discover that Oh can prevent the subsequent invasion of earth by the Boov’s enemies by logging onto his email account and canceling the invitation…as long as he can sneak into the Boov headquarters in Paris without getting caught.
First of all, why would an alien species devote to running away deliberately design technology which would inform every intelligent species in the galaxy where they are? Second of all, you can’t just cancel a transmission that has traveled presumably millions of light years instantaneously. Third of all, Oh is a terrible protagonist because he spends almost the entire film lying to Tip, manipulating her, and trying to ditch her. And lastly, Rihanna, Tip’s voice actress, delivers a dreadful performance. Apparently suffering from the delusion that she is performing on-stage instead of in a voice booth, Rihanna projects all of her lines, even the supposedly quite and sombre ones, like she’s speaking up for the back row. I know that’s not an issue with the narrative, but it bothered me just as much as the film’s many, many plot holes and idiotic story developments.
2/10
Advertisement
Advertisement