Safely Done

Rating: 7/10 (21 December 2009)

The 3d special effects are a marvel that will encapsulate you inside the cockpit of a futuristic helicopter, give you the point of view of a marine embarking on a new world and completely immerse you in a foreign planet. The 3D aspect makes the movie worth seeing, however the much anticipated and hyped otherworldly experience is safely kept on our own world.
The environment is a richly lush jungle where some of the plants do mildly quirky things. The creatures are derivatives of dinosaurs or horses or other earth bound animals. The attractive "aliens" are tall humanoids that are safely exotic with light blue skin and cute tails. The alien's society easily mocks societies that we are familiar with. The imagination with such a project could have truly taken us to the outer-limits and that would be fascinating when paired with innovative 3D special effects instead we are still kept mostly earthbound. There is some imagination such as the natives interesting kinship to nature and the visually stunning, romantically glowing forest at night but the makers were relatively safe and too frightened to frighten us away. Alas, we still remain on Earth, despite the "promise" to take us to a new world.
The story could have really taken off to the furthest stretches of the imagination unfortunately few risks were taken in this department as well and we are presented with something very crowd pleasing and conventional. We've seen this predictable cookie cutter storyline in other movies and the lack of innovation will prevent this from being a classic. Simple cartoonish characters unrealistically and unbelievably portray humans in the future. Can I really suspend my belief that people in the future will choose to start a war and destroy an alien race over some mineral or will humans of the future rather get more of a reward of studying such a species? Audience will be forced to dumb-down their minds to the comic bookie state, take the movie for what it is and enjoy the spectacular special effects and new 3D technology. The movie was really about the 3D special effects which will generate an "oh cool" sentiment without distracting us from the story. Despite all this it is still an entertaining, more summery, popcorn, blockbuster.