Aliens walk among us. And they're very rude
dir: Greg Mottola
This flick is a perfect storm of nerd signposts and signifiers so nerdish in their nerdishness that it’s akin to watching a table full of Comic-Book Guys playing with their Magic the Gathering cards, drinking Pepsi Max straight from the bottle for an hour and a half.
However, before you suspect that I’m going to go for cheap and easy laughs mocking the indefensible, and an easy pop cultural target at that, let me just say that I am a fairly nerdy person myself (as are all people who obsessively watch movies and complain about them on the tubes of the internets, let’s be honest about it), so the question for me is whether Paul is a tolerable movie because of its nerdiness or in spite of it.
Well, the two are inseparable, really. Since its two lead characters are nerds playing nerds (quite deftly, I might add), and it’s a homage to the science fiction flicks of the 1980s (mostly, though Close Encounters was earlier), and one of its main characters is a CGI alien, you can’t really grade it on its Shakespearean qualities or its Byronic pathos.
Clive and Graeme (Nick Frost and Simon Pegg) are two British nerds who’ve achieved the dream of a lifetime by travelling to the States and going to the Comic-Con event in San Diego. Some people aim high in their dreams, others aim low, but the important thing is to have a dream, I guess, no matter how achievable.
The script keeps throwing up scenes and misunderstandings where people assume Clive and Graeme are gay, and who would be the butch and who would be the bitch, but they deny it, despite the fact that circumstances keep thrusting them together, and the fact that they carry on like a bit of an old married gay couple.
The point is, I guess, that, taking out the gay panic aspect, a lot of longtime nerd friends do sometimes seem like co-dependent little couples, since most women, at least on the big screen, seem to not be able to tolerate the smell of them, at least until the end of the movie. So these desperate, enabling and isolating relationships can kind of exclude other people, and experiences.
Despite the science fiction trappings and comedic references, it seems like that is also the theme of the flick, giving the main characters a good reason to seek relationships beyond solely the company of each other.
They’re shamelessly nerdy. They’re the kind of nerds that other nerds would beat up on if only they possessed any upper body strength. But I’m sure they’re sweet guys.
After the convention, they elect to embark on that hoariest of cinematic clichés being the road trip across certain parts of America. They intend to visit ‘famous’ sites and sights along the way, being the alleged locations of UFO sightings that have become lore amongst the True Believers. So, yes, Area 51 and Roswell get mentions.
Along the way they bump into an actual alien, who calls himself Paul (voiced by Seth Rogen). This would perhaps be, you’d think, the nerd equivalent of nirvana, but the path of such things can’t be too smooth.
Paul is the living, everloving equivalent of every alien image and cliché of the last however many years. The movie’s tongue-in-cheek claim is that Paul has been the basis for all the hysteria and sci-fi ideas that bled into the popular consciousness over the last sixty years. He’s even chatted with certain directors on the phone to give them ideas as to how to make their movies starring ugly aliens with glowing fingers and home phoning tendencies.
Having Paul tell Steven Fucking Spielberg to go subtle and that he should adhere to the dictum “show, don’t tell” was probably the most inspired nerd moment in the last two hundred years of human history.
For a purely CGI creation, Paul is pretty great. It depends on your tolerance for fully CGI creations (like Jar Jar Binks, Gollum or Scarlett Johansson) as to whether your eyes and brain can accept them. This is probably one of the most physically weighty looking ones I’ve ever seen. I don’t know how much my nerdish leanings impact on my ability to suspend disbelief enough to accept him, but I’d say he’s one of the better examples of this kind of character.
And, despite the fact that, in the back of my mind, I couldn’t entirely get rid of the echo of an idea that he should have been called Poochie, Seth Rogen’s irritable and irritating take on the character really works well. I can’t stand Seth Rogen that much at the moment, but I thought he was a good match for the character, who is mostly a foul-mouthed dope-smoking smartarse.
Of course the flick needs antagonists, and supplies them heartily. There’s the woman voiced by Sigourney Weaver, who orders the Men in Black chasing Paul around, lead coolly by Jason Bateman (whose character’s name is the least funny and oddest joke in the flick, though odd enough to remark upon), a bible basher pursuing his daughter who he thinks has been kidnapped by demons (John Carrol Lynch), and some token rednecks.
The flick actually takes time out to try to settle the whole science versus religion argument, when a woman they meet who they eventually befriend wears a t-shirt showing Jesus blowing Charles Darwin’s brains out with a gun, with the words “Evolve This!” above the image. I am sure there are plenty of places in the States where similar sentiments are probably expressed and applauded, but it seemed strange to take time out to have a virtual re-enactment of the Scopes Monkey Trial in a comedy.
Ruth (Kristen Wiig) is a one-eyed clueless woman who comes to realise what bullshit religion and such really are once Paul slaps his grey, slimy hand atop her bonce, sharing his knowledge of life, the universe and everything in a few seconds of mind-melding. She goes from a prim, oppressed wall flower to a profane hyperslut in the blink of a goddamn eye.
That’s worth mentioning: though nearly all of the flick’s this flick homages were PG-13 (except Aliens, I’d think), this is a gleefully profane movie. In the spirit of revelation, or breaking free of ignorance, Ruth’s character gets to unleash whatever awkward swearing she’s kept repressed for most of her life, which is funny only insofar as swearing itself is inherently funny even when you’re not five, apparently. She does get some good phrases in, that’s for sure.
Clive’s discomfort with the presence of Paul and Ruth of course is going to give way eventually, but it points to what I was referring to earlier as to the way nerd friendships are depicted as being fairly exclusionary by default, not design. It’s not played for the sexual angle, as in, it’s not a sexual jealousy that bothers Clive, it’s the fact that there are other people (or beings, what have you, diverting Graeme’s attention from what should be quality time spent arguing about which action figures are the best, or which series and captain in Star Trek is superior to the others.
The irony, of course, is meant to be that Clive, who’s whole existence seems to hinge around thinking and talking about science fiction, is less than impressed when an actual alien appears, proving the existence of extraterrestrial life once and for all. You’d think he’d be grateful having finally grasped the nerd Holy Grail, but whatever.
It’s a comedy, first and foremost, so the action does start to seem a bit arbitrary, but is well staged all the same. It spends enough time mocking the propensities of nerds that it doesn’t seem like it’s pandering to us too much (as in, it takes shots at the nerd habit of paying exorbitant prices for worthlessly shit merchandising, and furries, and the general fecklessness of nerds outside of their narrow comfort zones). I enjoyed it, and saw it at a screening surrounded by the very pinnacle and epitome of the demographic represented, and they seemed to lap it up. They’re the ones, on the other hand, that didn’t laugh when they heard lines like “Boring conversation anyway” or “Get away from her you bitch” despite knowing exactly where and when, down probably to the very timecode to the second where they appear in their respective movies. So there are a few gags that miss the mark by a substantial degree, eliciting groans instead of guffaws.
The one line that made me gag in disbelief involved Clive explaining to Paul how he’d always wanted to meet aliens ever since watching Mac and Me as a child. That freaked me the fuck out, considering Mac and Me is an absolute abomination of a ripoff flick made to capitalise on ET where the alien, called Mac, eats McDonalds and drinks Coke nonstop to stay alive, in a film proudly funded by McDonalds and Coke. It’s one of the nadirs of humanity mentioned in a flick applauding our better natures. I guess that’s the kind of thing Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, who I’ve loved in everything they’ve done from Spaced to Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, are great at, mashed together with their very nerdy natures. They’re charming and good natured enough to get away with all sorts of excesses I’d find intolerable from lesser beings.
I liked it, a lot. You might not. You are probably a more well-rounded person with a more balanced life than I. So what are you doing reading about such geeky pursuits? Shouldn’t you be closing property deals and playing racquetball? Go on, get.
8 times flicks like this also make nerds feel superior in their nerdiness by thinking “at least I’m not as nerdy as those costume-wearing nerds" out of 10
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“How come I can understand you? Are you using some neural language router?”
- “Actually I'm speaking English you fucking idiot!” – speak English or pie, Paul
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