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I wanted to love this movie for multiple reasons. First, I love that director Aristomenis Tsirbas made a short film and that it got enough attention that he was able to make a feature film from it. The inspiration that he and Shane Acker (who made the feature film 9) provide for myself and others making short films is immense. Second, the premise of humans being the invading aliens is also very appealing to me. It’s like Independence Day in reverse. Many saw the film as an allegory to the Iraq war and the similarities are glaring.

Alas, at the end of the day the film’s drawbacks outweigh its intentions. The biggest of which is the limited budget, but I had other issues with the script and premise that didn’t live up to its promise. The scope of the story/script is at the same time wide and narrow. The humans explain that they had colonized Mars and Venus after the Earths resources were exhausted, but a massive war destroyed all three planets and they searched out the nearest life-sustaining planet. So this is not only centuries in the future, but likely millennium. I would like to think that the human race is much more intelligent now than we were five centuries ago, and yet this films vision of millennium from now is that we will have not advanced in the least, save for technology. Society will still run much like the US political system now. The military, still the same male-led and mostly inhabited spectrum with women only in minor roles. The races of humans are still as strikingly dissimilar as we are now, as presented by the Caucasian masses, yet the ethnically African president (almost a prediction to today’s system). I would think that in another millennium our ethnic differences may not be entirely erased, but the differences would be much more muddied and subtle.

At this point I will have to admit that perhaps I’m expecting too much from a PG-rated science-fiction/fantasy animated film. But if you want to tell a simple story then you can do that outside of science-fiction set millennium from now. If the scope of your science-fiction premise is this far in the future I’m going to expect another level of creative embellishment and development on our current society than what I was given here.

I’ll leave my science-fiction snobbery behind now and just speak on the look of the animation itself, which is a lot of shades of brown. Brown is one of my least favorite colors. The Terrian characters and backgrounds are seemingly various shades of brown, khaki and beige. For a color scope it’s very limited and unattractive. Beautiful reds and greens are first introduced when the invading alien ships start abducting the Terrians. These shots are very vibrant and beautiful. The irony is that the most beautiful shots of the film are the laser beams and explosions and yet the film overall is very anti-war.

I also found the amount of background detail limited as well as clothing and other textures. Also, the character animation is not the best. With this limited of a budget it seems that the character animation has suffered making the Terrians seem less real and much less emotive than we’ve become accustomed to with the bigger budgeted animated films of late.

The character design of the humans was less interesting than the Terrians. Our main human character, Jim Stanton, is bald as are the Terrians and most of the other Humans. The characters are admittedly bald because it’s cheaper to animate according to the director’s commentary. In addition the main villain, General Hemmer, is designed with a long angled nose and pointy ears. Voiced by the incredibly talented Brian Cox, it seems overkill to make him look evil as well as sound evil. As evil as his character looked, what if he’d been good? Or isn’t he evil enough? Does he have to look evil as well? Evil characters look evil, good characters look good, it’s not new, but it is overdone and a nice change of pace would’ve been very welcome.

The voice cast is an impressive group of name actors, many well known. Evan Rachel Wood and Luke Wilson do a solid job as our two main characters. Brian Cox is perfectly suited as the villainous General Hemmer, but the voice that gives the film its most human feel is ironically David Cross as the helper robot Giddy. His nuanced performance is the most fun to listen to and actually adds a lot of heart to the film.

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