Space Chimps (2008)

Brilliant and touching

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Three chimps are trained via the space program to save aliens who have become the victims to a ruthless dictator. Very slight animated feature that is pleasant enough, but may bore some more discriminating viewers. With that said, "Space Chimps" should be enjoyable to the youngsters and some of the tongue-in-cheek humor will keep most hardened adults watching as well. Good animation techniques, cool voice characterizations, and an adequate story are more than enough here to keep this spaceship flying at a safe orbit for animated feature productions. One of those films which seems to get kind of lost in the shuffle of the genre, but is not a bad effort at all by the film-makers involved. 4 stars out of 5.

Space Chimps never made it to theaters here in Japan (it happens, with non-big-studio films...) so I just got around to seeing it on DVD 3 years late.The positives:Overall I quite liked the CGI. The chimps were all well done and nicely expressive, and the general visual mood of the film was charming. Kilowatt and the gummy aliens were both nifty.I also found myself generally liking the characters and their interactions by the end, mostly the supporting chimps and Kilowatt. Ham III's inevitable development fleshed him out acceptably. The scientists were somewhat interesting, though maybe just to grownups?The negatives:I didn't much like Ham III. They touched on why he lived his life the way he did, but that never sunk in enough to cancel out his first (and middle, and almost to the end) impression of being pretty much a jerk.The story was very straightforward with few surprises (a polite way of saying "predictable.") The dialogue was equally straightforward, with most characters saying more or less what you expect them to say at that point in the film. Ham does some reckless thing and makes a mess of things, Ham hits on Luna and she's exasperated at him, we've all seen this stuff before. Exceptions were Zartog and Titan's interactions which I found the most innocently charming parts of the movie, along with the three scientists, though the latter did seem to be floating off in their own story universe disconnected from the rest of the film a bit too much.Zartog was just kind of irrelevantly bad because he's bad, and no-one else in his village was more than an extra, so his non-sequitur freezing of random aliens wound up having no emotional impact on me whatsoever. When he and Titan were interacting he started to become interesting, but there simply wasn't enough of that to fill him out as the main bad guy.Also the design of the main alien species was visually weak, and that detracted from things. They were just nondescriptly blobby green people, more the kind of design you'd use for an incidental alien species rather than the main alien presence. Nothing particularly appealing or even memorable.What most weakened the film was the pacing. Dialogue has a natural flow to it, but here it seemed like most of the lines wound up packed next to each other way too tightly. Maybe to minimize the amount of CGI they had to create (keeping the budget reasonable)? It simply didn't feel like the characters ever had enough time to absorb each other's lines before it was time to say their own lines in response, and it wound up feeling like everybody was just reading the script at each other for 80 minutes.---Despite my focus on the negatives above, overall I wound up liking the characters in spite of the presentation, and by the end I wanted the film to have been more solidly put together than it was. I wanted to know these characters better. Maybe at 80 minutes it was inevitably rushed, but the structural problems were deeper than that. On the surface level (CG, acting, scoring) it more than crossed the "good enough" line in the first couple of minutes, so it's that much more frustrating that it didn't pull it off on a more emotionally-satisfying level too.I'd give it a 6 out of 10. Worth renting, may or may not be worth owning, probably wasn't worth seeing in the theater. Probably a good thing it didn't come to Japan; in the year of Ponyo and Wall-E it would have been annihilated.

This film ranks among the worst films I have ever seen in my entire life. Not a single joke was funny, not a single image of the film nice to look at or worth remembering. The last minutes of the film, where the "bad guys" of the film are present the most, were almost unwatchable considering the awful designs of the creatures, and the absence of wit and ideas in the plot. I had the feeling I was watching a badly designed video game whose graphics are below average. At times watching it felt like torture for me and if I hadn't had a principle of never walking out on a film I would have left the theater. Simply put, it is one of the worst and ugliest films I have seen.

This movie has nothing new for us except the freezing stuff on the alien planet. It was a long time since such an incoherent concoction was construed before us. The plot is almost impossible to bear or follow, due to its hops between different scenes, and the myriad of aliens, chimps and people. To top it all, the animation is quite inferior compared to Pixar's. So why was this movie done? If you love chimps to the point of being a fan, you can admire their virtues as the inheritors of corrupted people. Even the most free spirited chimp, represented by Ham IIIrd, can grasp itself and rise beyond the highest human morals.