Paul is Hop for adolescents, or arrested adolescents. Graeme and Clive (Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, who also scripted) are among the latter, first seen attending Comic Con, the annual mecca for sci-fi and comic-book nerds. ‘How long have we dreamed about coming here?’ they ask each other in the hotel room later. ‘Since we were kids. And look at us now – grown men!’. Then there’s a knock at the door, and they jump up like excited 12-year-olds: “Pizza!!!”. It’s that kind of movie.
The smart-ass CGI visitor in Hop was the Easter Bunny, but here it’s an alien named Paul (voiced by Seth Rogen) – though in fact Hop is only the most recent iteration of this well-worn plot; the most famous version is E.T., a film which Paul very consciously sets out to copy (and partly spoof). The other difference from Hop is of course that the accents are reversed: Russell Brand was a rabbit with an English accent, whereas here Graeme and Clive are Brits in America – which is significant because it means they’re aliens just as much as Paul is, trying to get their heads around middle-American oddities like hostile rednecks (Deliverance is name-dropped) and Christian fundamentalists. “I’ve heard about England. No guns,” says a local cop disapprovingly, going on to wonder how those English cops are supposed to shoot perps without any weapons. Meanwhile, Graeme has his own issues with the New World: “Tea is weird in America; they leave the bag in”.
Our heroes end up in the heartland because they’re on a tour of famous UFO sites (like I said, they’re nerds), stopping at diners where you can buy “Alien on Board” car stickers along with your coffee. Then they meet Paul – he appears out of nowhere, all alone in the desert – and Graeme quietly takes the “Alien on Board” sticker off their RV (after all, they don’t want to advertise), one of the film’s better jokes. Actually, most of its funniest gags tend to be throwaway details. My favourite is perhaps during Comic Con, when we catch a glimpse of the men’s room: the sign for “Men” reads “Maliens” – which is droll enough, but then the camera pulls back slightly to show that the sign for “Women” reads … “Women”, a perfect little dig at the boys’-club insularity of nerd-dom.
It may seem strange to chuckle over details when the film offers so much more – but in fact the film offers too much. Pegg and Frost also co-starred in (and Pegg co-wrote) Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz in addition to this one – and all three films share the same problem, a compulsion to have it both ways that makes them feel airless and contrived. Paul wants to be a rude comedy riffing on the old Spielbergian template, but also wants to work in the crowd-pleasing Spielberg way – and the latter aim strait-jackets the former. Thus, for instance, Paul (like E.T.) has the power of giving life, which he uses, with suitably inspiring music on the soundtrack, on a dead bird – only to then devour the bird (“I wasn’t going to eat a dead bird!”), deflating the moment for a quick laugh. Fine; but then he also uses his power to resurrect a dead pal at the climax, and this time the inspiring music is for real. The film ends with a group-hug as Paul (like E.T.) ascends to his spaceship – and Paul once again deflates the moment, cracking “I can feel your boner!” for another quick laugh. Fine; but a group-hug is still a group-hug, and we’re still supposed to feel heart-warmed and uplifted as well as laughing. You can’t have it both ways.
Maybe I’m just the wrong audience – because Paul seems to work on the assumption that we all try to resist Spielberg-style manipulation (being all hard and ironic and whatnot) but secretly love every moment, whereas for me it’s exactly the opposite: I honestly try to like those big swelling Hollywood climaxes, but I’m always put off by the hard sell and bigger-is-better mentality. I feel much the same about Seth Rogen, whose brash, bumptious persona is as much a part of Paul as Pegg’s and Frost’s self-deprecating Englishness: his alien smokes pot, talks about his penis (“That’s actually small for my planet”), does a bit of mooning and generally acts like a Seth Rogen character. The assumption seems to be that we find him shocking but secretly think he’s brilliant – but I mostly wish he wouldn’t try so hard, nor do I see why being so convinced that he’s cool necessarily makes him so.
Uncool people, meanwhile, include Christians (the hardcore creationist kind) – but the Christian lass picked up en route sees the error of her ways after a few days with the trash-talking alien. Unlike E.T., who only wanted to be friends, Paul has strong views on everything, from the existence of God to the politics of being Different. “Are you an alien?” asks Graeme; “To you I am,” replies the little green immigrant – and the film has a strong liberal undertow, even as it’s making cute remarks about “Phone home” and Reese’s Pieces (an in-joke so obvious I won’t insult E.T. fans by explaining it here). Paul wants to be four different films: a ribald spoof, a straight sci-fi blockbuster, a bold Message-movie and a soothing nostalgia-piece for nerds who grew up in the 80s. At least Hop was just a comedy about a talking rabbit.
DIRECTED BY Greg Mottola
STARRING Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, the voice of Seth Rogen
US 2011 104 mins.
