DreamWorks’ ‘Home’ Review

Here is the kind of Blerd I am: given the opportunity to sit on an airplane traveling between US coasts and watch any movie still in theaters at the time for no additional charge, I pulled up DreamWorks’ Home faster than you could say Avengers: Age of Ultron (I also chose a subtitled Doraemon: Nobita’s Space Heroes, but that’s a different story). Was the choice worth making? Well… yes and no. Based on Adam Rex’s novel The True Meaning of Smekday, the film stars Rihanna as Gratuity “Tip” Tucci (ha!) and recounts the journey of one little girl finding her mother after an alien race called the Boov take over Earth in an attempt to hide from their enemies, the Gorg. The movie paces itself a little clumsily in the beginning since it seems eager to introduce us to Oh (voiced by The Big Bang Theory’s Jim Parsons) and his Boov culture while clearly feeling pressure to make sure the audience does not feel they’re being ripped off by a lack of Rihanna. This is not to discount, however, the joy of watching the mechanics of an alien invasion at work. Too often Hollywood sci-fi gets bogged down in the cliches that A) all extraterrestrial lifeforms must be humanoid and find humans to be the most attractive and/or threatening creatures in the universe, and B) our technology and cultures should more or less match up perfectly, making the function of all every day objects apparent (of course we have porcelain toilets on our planet! All intelligent lifeforms arrive at this one specific design!…