Home
Director: Tim Johnson
Writer: Tom J. Astle, Matt Ember
Based on: Adam Rex‘ book The True Meaning of Smekday
Cast: Jim Parsons, Rihanna, Steve Martin, Jennifer Lopez, Matt Jones, Brian Stepanek
Seen on: 10.4.2015

Plot:
Oh (Jim Parsons) is excited: led by Captain Smek (Steve Martin), he and his people, the Boov, are about to land on a new planet, taking over to make everything better for its inhabitants and especially for the Boov. But Oh has a reputation for screwing up and it’s not enitrely unfounded. When he does so once more, he has to go on the run. That’s when he meets Tip (Rihanna). When all the humans were relocated to Australia, she managed to stay behind in New York, fending for herself alone, if you don’t count her cat Pig, until she will be able to find and reunite with her mother. Oh offers to help her locate her mother if Tip helps him escape and so the two of them have to take on all of the Boov – and the Gorg who the Boov are running from in the first place.

Home was sweet. It tackles big topics in a manner perfectly suited for children and it is entertaining while it does so. Despite many jokes made for adults, it might be geared a little too much toward children to really appeal to me, but that is no fault at all.

I don’t mean to say that I didn’t enjoy Home. I did. It made me laugh, I approve the general message (how often do we get children’s movies about colonialism anyway? Especially one that doesn’t try to gloss it over [looking at you, Pocahontas]?) and I loved how it showed that you don’t need to be evil to be a colonialist – in fact, the argument that it’s for the good of the colonized which must mean that the colonizers are good as well, is the primary excuse for the Boov.

But sometimes it ended up being a little too simplistic for its own good. [SPOILERS] The realization that it’s actually the Boov who are the bad guys in this is great, but that the threat of the Gorg was so easily resolved, that Oh actually became Captain etc etc [/SPOILERS], it was all just a little too clean.

Nevertheless, the film gets many things right, above all the casting and its sense of humor. Jim Parsons is perfect as Oh and his mangling of English in both vocabulary and inflection is hilarious [though it does beg the question: did all Boov learn English and talk in it to each other?]. Rihanna, too, was great as Tip, giving her a lot of warmth and spunk.

With the film we usually get, it is also important to point out how wonderful it is to get a main character who is from an ethnic minority and to get a teenaged character who actually looks like a teenager (though, honestly, the thin bodies and bobble-head design that is currently so in did bother me a little bit). It is sad that this film is the exception in this, but we’ll have to be happy for what we’re given. And I was happy with the film in general.

Summarizing: Sweet.