Review of “Space Chimps”
In much the same way dogs can hear sounds outside our range of perception, the mind of the three-year-old is wired for a sense of comedy outside our range of understanding. “The bird is in the tree,” my son will say when I ask why he has collapsed in paroxysms of laughter. It is exactly this level of sophistication that Space Chimps is targeted at.
The plot concerns Ham III, grandson of the first chimp (Ham I) shot into space as part of the space race. Ham III works as a simian cannonball in a circus, and dreams of better things. Queue plot device, and he is enlisted as part of an all-chimp team being sent by NASA into a potentially deadly wormhole to test its safety for the ‘real’ astronauts. On the other side of the wormhole, however, is a colourful world with an evil dictator for the chimps to tangle with.
There is a lot to like in Space Chimps. The voice cast, including Andy Samberg, Stanley Tucci, Kristen Chenowith, and Jeff Daniels, sounds like they were having a blast, with real invention and fun to the vocals. The screenplay, in parts (the bits with the chimps), has some big laughs, and not just in the Youtube-clip monkey sniffs his own butt and falls off the branch kind of way (although there is a little of that too). It is nonsense, though in the Edward Lear, fun sense of the word. But in other moments, it is so execrable, you want to throw something at the screen.
Watching Space Chimps feels akin to watching someone else play a circa-mid-90s Playstation game (something from the Spyro the Dragon oeuvre perhaps). The colours are as hallucinatory, the character development about on-par, and I either wanted to snatch the controls and make something interesting (or at least sensible) happen, or get ‘altered’ so I could let the inanity wash over me. Still, these space chimps are a fun and endearing bunch and fare much better than the real-life space chimps, many of whom asphyxiated while strapped into a tiny metal box high above the Earth. You might want to leave that bit out for the three-year-olds. In animation, direction… in fact everything, it is inferior to its competitor for your viewing dollar, WALL-E, but it should be money well spent if you have a very young family.
CK
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