text: This wasn't all that great. Not terrible or hateful or anything, just forgettable.<br /><br />It had a sort of, um, hesitant, diluted air, like it never properly knew whether it wanted to go for laughs or for sweetness or for satire. So we were left with weak mix of the three. The actors seemed kinda lost.<br /><br />Also, the ideas were really tired and recycled, almost zombified themselves. How many more times do we have to be told the 50's in the States were infected with a banal sense of conformity? And that this was perpetuated by aggressive consumerism? And that emotional repression in men is a baaaaad thing? Old hat.<br /><br />Its biggest crime in my eyes though was just how detached from reality it was. I know it was a comedy and all, but - especially in a full movie where you must keep the interest of an audience for a prolonged period - you still need some sort of emotional anchor, some relatable guide through the story, to make it engaging. For the 'hero' kid to watch an old woman, two fellow school pupils and ultimately his father die painfully at the hands of zombies or whatever and for him to greet it all with a cheery smile and a shrug of the shoulders, then I just struggle to deal with that in any sort of positive way. The mum was the same. If you make your two main characters so inhuman on that level, then you risk losing me and that's what happened.<br /><br />Biggest positive I can offer is that I love the look of that sort of apple pie suburbia and this captured it well enough, it was a handsome film, especially some of those wide angled shots of the street and inside the Robinsons' house. Also, the opening newsreel was cute, in a been-done-before-but-still-funny sort of way.<br /><br />And I thought Billy Connolly was OK and that comes from someone who isn't a big fan of Billy Connolly: Movie Star. I just had this fear he was going to be hamming it up and trying to steal every scene, but he played it pretty low-key for him and probably came out the most sympathetic character in the whole film.<br /><br />All in all, not great though.