A couple of weeks ago, Paul was on rotation on Film4 and I was vaguely wondering whether I should watch it again. I'd seen it shortly after it was released on DVD and been bitterly disappointed, but sometimes time can be a healer. Besides, if I had all these strong feelings about the film, wouldn't my brand new movie blog be the perfect place to examine them?
Before I start getting all overwrought on you, here's the obligatory plot synopsis.
Graeme and Clive (Simon Pegg and Nick Frost respectively) are a couple of British sci-fi geeks on the trip of a lifetime, starting out at San Diego Comic-Con and then taking a Winnebago and heading out to look at places such as Roswell and Area 52. Whilst driving across the desert late at night, they witness a car crash and stop to help the driver, who turns out to be the small grey alien Paul (voiced by Seth Rogen). It's tempting to describe what ensues as ET but with (lots) more anal sex jokes, but... no, what the hell, it really is.
The good
The animation work on Paul himself is really adorable; the character designers have seen fit to give him huge blue-grey eyes rather than the standard expressionless black jobs, and it works beautifully. Appropriately, he's the best-realized character in the film, and it isn't hard to empathize with his plight.There's also a few lovely cameos here to be enjoyed - Jeffrey Tambor stands out as a relentlessly pragmatic sci-fi author, and Jane Lynch is just as enchanting as always as a kindly diner owner.
The bad
I keep wanting to point out that this isn't as bad a film as I'm about to imply, but... I'm honestly not sure.Here's the deal, then: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and I have history. Along with Jessica Hynes and Mark Heap, I loved them in Spaced, the first TV programme I ever saw that felt as though it was about people like me. Then came the Cornetto Trilogy, starting with Shaun of the Dead, the first zombie movie I ever saw and an absolute masterclass in narrative structure - it didn't hurt that it was incredibly bloody funny, either. After Shaun came Hot Fuzz, which did for buddy cop movies what Shaun had done for the undead - it wasn't so perfectly constructed but the jokes were arguably better, and if it took me a little longer to warm to it, well, I re-watch it several times a year now and it still makes me laugh out loud.
Then came Paul, and I was disappointed, but I put it down to Edgar Wright not being involved and eagerly anticipated release of the final part of the Cornetto Trilogy. It took another two years for the World's End to be released, and if I'm being completely honest, I'm still not entirely convinced. Thematically, it's a mess, but I'm tackling it the same way I did Hot Fuzz, by repeatedly re-watching it until I love it. Besides, it was filmed very close to where my mother grew up, which gives the images of body-snatcher related destruction an extra level of appeal.
Anyhow, we'll set Shaun aside for the moment because it gets everything right.
Hot Fuzz got most things right, too, but a lot of that was due to Nick Frost. As gormless plod Danny Butterman, he lent the movie its heart, presenting a far more likeable figure than Simon Pegg's supercop. It's easy to dismiss Frost as the fat sidekick, but he's a great screen presence and a damned fine actor - perhaps (whisper it), a better actor than Pegg.
The fact is that in recent years, Simon Pegg has been writing himself a bunch of roles that border on being outright Mary Sues. In Hot Fuzz, he's the perfect cop who saves the day; in The World's End, he's the tormented rebel who stands up to the alien menace and eventually ends up as a living legend. In the background, meanwhile, Frost plays a sympathetic figure on the receiving end of a bunch of jokes that tend to play off his physical bulk. Pegg is undoubtedly a very talented writer, but damned if his past decade's work doesn't look like the result of a bunch of therapy sessions in the face of a mid-life crisis.
All of which finally brings me back to Paul, where Pegg plays a thoroughly decent bloke who eventually saves the alien, gets the girl and helps write an award-winning book about it all. There can't be anything wrong with that, can there?
Well, no, except for the fact that the girl's been abducted and he's made jokes over her unconscious body, and the sole thing that seems to attract him to her is that she's the only female his own age in the movie. As for saving the alien, well, that's a little more complex and has to do with narrative structure and character arcs - right through the movie, it's Frost's character who starts out suspicious and gradually grows closer to Paul; I can't help feeling that it would have been far more emotionally satisfying, therefore, if it had been his character who'd been ready to sacrifice himself for him. It's also the Frost character who's the author of the pair of them, so I'm not sure what sense it made to have Pegg's cartoonist as eventual joint winner of the literary award. It feels to me as though Pegg isn't prepared to share the narrative spotlight with anybody, which makes me feel kind of embarrassed on his behalf.
Oh, and up top, where I made the comment about anal sex jokes?As writers, Pegg and Frost evidently think these are hilarious; for long stretches of the film they pop up every five minutes, generally with rape as the implicit context. This destroyed any real sympathy I had for their characters before we even get into the female kidnapping subplot, which is unfortunate, given that apart from the alien himself, they're the only characters meant to be deserving of our affection. Dammit, I know that there's nothing your average self-identifying male geek finds quite so charming as one of his own, but give me a break here? These two seem to be up against it from absolutely everybody they meet. Every other character is a broad caricature, from the religious fundamentalists to the homophobic rednecks, never mind that our heroes are guilty of constant low-level homophobia themselves. This is a mean-spirited movie and an intolerant one, unless you're a card-carrying emotionally stunted sci-fi fanatic yourself, in which case it may be one of the most inclusive films you'll ever see.
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