Eye Candy #218 - "The Battle for Terra"

The Battle for Terra:  In the distant future, after the destruction of Earth and its colonies on Mars and Venus, humanity’s survival rests on finding an inhabitable planet that they can transform into a new home.  This leads them through space (in a giant spaceship that looks like some kind of cuisinart) to the planet Terra, a cloudy world populated by a race of floating lizard-like creatures.  The humans attack, capturing Terrians with their fighter craft, including the father of Mala (the heroine of the film, voiced by Evan Rachel Wood).  The Terrians believe that when they are captured, they are being captured by their gods.  One of the human fighter craft crash-lands while chasing Mala across Terra, and she brings the human (Lt. Jim Stanton, voiced by Luke Wilson) back to her city to find a way to rescue her father.  They bond fairly quickly and it is then up to Mala and Stanton to save the captured Terrians and prevent the humans from destroying Terra’s atmosphere by making it more palatable to human lungs (the process of which would kill the Terrians).  One more entry in an ever-growing sea of mediocre CGI animation, “The Battle of Terra” is disappointing in both plot and visuals.  Let me get this straight - you have cutting edge CGI technology and the best you can come up with for the Terrians is floating bag people with large eyes and minimal physical detail?   And the plot involving the overbearing human military and its blind pursuit of its own destructive ends has been done to death, so if you’re going to do it, you should do it with some kind of original hook.  I will give them credit - they did more with this film with a budget a fraction of major release (only $4-8 million production budget), but that doesn‘t excuse its lack of originality and energy.  Woodchuck sez, “Skip it.”