A ghastly fire (BOMB)

Rating: 2/10 (19 December 2009)

In some ways this movie is trying to be an adult version of Ferngully the last rainforest. The part of the world inhabited by these creatures, the 'moldy h icans' is like a director's wet dream of Eden, only with attractively plant draped mountains that float (instead of bolting into space). Meanwhile the inhabitants are a wide range of large or stretched versions of creatures we are familiar with: Big big bugs or flying reptiles.
It is a concept flick- man through technology transmits mind into fabricated creature that can live among the intelligent kind of its homeworld. The homeworld has something we (evil humans) want. Humans cannot live on planet but we want a precious material which defies gravity, baldly called unobtainium. The aliens are blue, and look (pick one) like elongated supermodels (every one of them) or cat people with no fur or whiskers. Either way you get wide faces and big yellow eyes right off those 70s paintings on black velvet only with pouty lips. One possibly somewhat original idea is that the intelligent social aliens have tails, at the end of which are exposed nerve fibers that can bond with significantly useful critters to ride, such as a reptilian eyed large flyer, or other critters where the nerve endings might come from other parts of their bodies like a tail to head mind-meld.
I do not recall any of these sharp toothed creatures eating or any significant blood flow from anything. Even the roots of the trees are nerve endings according to the Sigourney Weaver character. Meanwhile, there are no latrines, these natives apparently wander around the vertical environment making nerve contact with wondrous beings but don't need to eat, defecate, raise children, set broken bones, sign contracts, clear leafmold, or establish a government. They don't apparently make music unless they are all arrayed in a large pattern helping the roots save someone's life or convert them to alienhood. It's like woodstock without the rain, the mud, or for that matter, the music. The movie soundtrack was by James Horner who seemed to channel tangerine dream at times, and John Williams at other times. So sometimes the music was spacy, and other times it was star wars.
It goes on for 2 and a half hours and is excruciatingly unbelievable on its own terms. More than the ten bucks, it's the 2 and a half hours I'll never get back and the pained look I could feel on my face as the bad guys were made to look really bad, driving bulldozers ten stories high or trying to destroy an especially important part of the fiber tree of life.
If you loved the self-righteous extermination of the environment to make a point such as "On Dangerous Ground" where the good guys blow up an arctic oil refinery in order to promote environmentalism, this film may resonate with you.
Personally, I think putting the ten dollars to a meal with a lot of fiber in it would have had more agreeable results with a better end product.