Home (2015)

Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

The first must-see film of the year.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

This is a movie that I still talk about and rave about almost 3 years after it's release. Home is a great way to teach young children that home is where your heart is. This can be used as a great tool especially for military children that have parents overseas.

There are five Rihanna songs in this movie. Why? Why would you do that at all, let alone when Rihanna is voicing the female lead? I just don't understand this movie.

We have seen many movies in which kids have interact with extra terrestrials before. From E.T. to Lilo and Stitch, we have seen this been done before. "Home" is a movie that tries this formula, and fails. It wants to be a funny and smart animated movie and it turns out that the film is nether funny nor smart. It's the basic kids movie formula disguised as a DreamWorks movie and that boggles me. This was the studio that brought us great movies throughout the past decade, but sadly, this film surely ain't one of them.The film begins with a "friendly invasion" (as the movie puts it) of Earth by an alien species known as the Boov who are led by Captain Smek (Steve Martin). They have been chased from planet to planet by the Gorg, the Boov's enemy. The humans have been relocated so the Boov can move into their homes. One Boov named Oh (Jim Parsons) is trying to make friends with the Boov, but none of them seem to like him. He decides to throw a housewarming party and invites everybody he knows to his party, and I mean everyone. Everyone in the galaxy, including the Gorg. Oh is then a fugitive on the run, and later bumps into a fourteen year old girl named Gratuity Tucci who goes under the name Tip (Rihanna). She is the only one not to be abducted and relocated by the Boov and is searching for her mother who was abducted along with everyone else. So, the two of them go off on a journey to find Tip's mother and clear Oh's name.The film is based off the book "The True Meaning of Smekday" by Adam Rex and having not read the book, I don't know how much of the book was kept in the film or not, but that still doesn't excuse the film's poor story and characters. The story is about as cliché a kids movie you can get. It's not awful, but certainly not great. The characters are cut outs. We have seen all the characters before. The screw up that has a good heart, the girl who tries to be tough but has a soft side, the bully captain that has a giant ego. It's nothing new. The performances of the characters is what I'm split over the most about them. Jim Parsons' performance as Oh sometimes gets a laugh, but sometimes watching him I kept thinking of Sheldon from Big Bang Theory and wishing he would have funnier things to say. Tip is a really well written character. She is written like a proper fourteen year old girl, but Rihanna's performance is what sinks her chances of being a good character. Her performance as Tip is so bland and unemotional that I'm really surprised that she got cast in the role. The only character in my opinion that actually has something funny to say and has good delivery of the lines is Steve Martin as Smek. He steals every scene of the movie he was in and was actually pretty funny in his role, maybe because he was the only Boov that could talk normal. Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention. The Boov talk like that "Can I has cheeseburger?" meme throughout the whole movie and it gets really old fast. "Home" is a film that in my opinion is in the wrong studios hand. I kept thinking that this film should have been in another studios hands like Illumination or maybe even Disney. Maybe they could have made the film much funnier and smarter than what DreamWorks had turned out. I don't know and I guess I never will. I don't think it would be bad to show "Home" to kids, but personally, I would just show them Lilo and Stitch instead.

This movie is OK. The plot is pretty strait forward: find Tip's mom. Its laid out pretty good but it sometimes doesn't make sense. The animation is good. Its voice actors are good. The writing is OK. I know what some of you will say "its because its animated" or " its just a kids movie." but that still doesn't count, there a lot of good animated/kids movies out there like Toy Story, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, How to train your dragon 2, or The Incredibles. So don't say that about animated kids movies. But other than that, I'm sorry but thats really all I can say about this film, its just OK. I can't think of anything else but IMDb has a minimum of 10 lines of text in a review, so ya........