A plain bad movie that is half baked

Rating: Null/10 (20 August 2011)

My wife and I went to see this movie because it was advertised as "what movie going is about" -- well they took my hard-earned moeny for granted for sure because this movie is plain bad. It is actually quite difficult to spoil this movie if one has already seen ET. To sum it up: this is ET with dumb acting, badly timed scary moments, better CGI, and a combined 20sec gruesome alien scene. The actors are all candybox cover kids that are stereotyped to the core: lead nerd kid has super coolness under gunpoint like superman; lead actress is a kid hottie from a trash home that is good at art, fair, we got a hippie. Sorry, no Asian or black kids involved. The plot is comprehensible because you can follow it, but it is just badly done and I still could not quite grasp how they manage to do it so badly after Neverending story and ET were made decades ago. The scary moments come out at illogical times, and instead of "wow" you get "what happened just now? somebody fill me in". CGI is done better than the ET dummy, but so they should -- we are decades past that now. There is some alien attacking people scene and some crash scene, which is thrown in the mix to redeem what we paid for the tickets. It's a cheesy movie making to the core. Kyle Chandler is the only good actor in this whole movie as he adds a certain goofy-ness to this otherwise horrible roller-coaster. In the end my wife and I both wished this movie ended halfway so we could pay less for the hourly parking.