The latest and certainly the least of the recent 3-D movies, Battle for Terra is directed by Canadian animator Aristomenis Tsirbas, based on an award-winning short film that he made six years ago. The latter’s computer animation depicted a strange and verdant world populated by floating sentient beings, and you can imagine how impressive it might have been in the context of a seven-minute short. At feature length, though, this project doesn’t have nearly enough inspiration to sustain itself.
The movie takes place centuries into the future, as the last remaining population of Earthlings seeks a new planet to inhabit. With their falling-apart spaceship about to run out of oxygen, they find a place with a poisonous atmosphere that can be converted into breathable air. The trouble is, the planet – dubbed Terra by the arriving Earth people – is already home to a species of intelligent aliens who can’t breathe our air. With no readily available way to coexist, the humans’ military leader (voiced by Brian Cox) overthrows his elected superiors and vows to take the planet by force. It’s up to a fighter pilot (voiced by Luke Wilson) and a female Terrian named Mala (voiced by Evan Rachel Wood), who saves his life when he crash-lands on Terra, to prevent one or both races from going extinct.
If this story reminds you of John Smith and Pocahontas, that’s only the beginning. The Terrians are basically like the American Indians in a revisionist 1990s Western film. They’re peaceful, mystical, carefree folk living in harmony with nature who are roused to violence only when they’re attacked. (The film does mention the Terrians’ having fought amongst themselves in the distant past, but the allusion is too brief to make much of an impact.) The Earthlings at least get to debate and agonize over what’s the right thing to do by the inhabitants of this planet. The Terrians are little more than sanitized projections of our own anxieties about colonization and our effect on the environment. No wonder they’re so dull.
Philosophical shortcomings aside, the movie’s low on entertainment value except for the smallest kids in the audience. The animators try to conjure a Terrian landscape full of alien beauty, but they don’t have the imaginative spark to pull that off. The attempts at comedy, most of which revolve around a robot (voiced by David Cross) that serves as interpreter between the humans and Terrians, are poor in both conception and execution. The action sequences with spaceships firing at each other have been done better in dozens of science-fiction movies. Even if there weren’t a bunch of other high-profile sci-fi flicks due out shortly, Battle for Terra would still offer no compelling reason to be seen.
