Aliens in the Attic

Movie Info

Genre(s): Adventure  |  Fantasy

Written by: Mark Burton (& story)
Adam F. Goldberg

Directed by: John Schultz

Release Date:
Theatrical: July 31, 2009
DVD: November 3, 2009

Running Time: minutes, Color

Origin: USA | Canada

Summary

RATING: PG for action violence, some suggestive humor and language

Starring Kevin Nealon, Robert Hoffman, Doris Roberts, Tim Meadows, and Ashley Tisdale

Kids on a family vacation must fight off an attack by knee-high alien invaders with world-destroying ambitions--while the youngsters' parents remain clueless about the battle. (20th Century Fox)

Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database Official Studio Site

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

What Our Users Said

Vote Now!The average user rating for this movie is 5.1 (out of 10) based on 16 User Votes

Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Benjamin H gave it a2:
Honestly, I'd rather just pull out an old copy of Spaced Invaders and show that to the kids than this. And I just might, I miss that movie.

Doug H gave it an8:
This movie was hilarious. We took our kid twice in one weekend and he laughed his head off both times. Ignore the lame CGI aliens. Who cares about bad CGI anyway? The jokes are hilarious and the cast has a lot of charisma.

Mike S gave it a1:
Who the F cares if there's aliens in the attic? THis has E.T rip off written all over it. I hope those five year olds enjoy because not very many others will.

kg m gave it a3:
The first five to ten minutes or so is actually pretty good w. the interplay of pre-teens, teenagers, and young adults—then the alien plot starts. The aliens aren’t scary, aren’t interesting, aren’t amusing, aren’t much of anything and the writers seem to have been suffering from writer’s block. What they put together is stupid in concept and stupid in substance. Perhaps nerdy teenagers might be amused by the story—I wasn’t. it’s harmless but so totally limp.

Alan gave it a7:
It is what it is. If you went to see it and you don't have young kids, it's your fault! I have two young children, they liked it, I laughed quite a bit. A much better movie than many and not as bad as the butcher job they made out of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince- which was a snooze fest.

Jonathan B. gave it a10:
Very funny. My son and I laughed from beginning to end. Good clean fun for all.

Chad S. gave it a5:
Eternal enslavement or instantaneous death are the choices offered by the Zarconians upon first contact with the children on a country house roof. These aliens talk a big game, and yet, it takes them an inordinate amount of time to escape the attic. "Peace is not an option," according to Tazer(Thomas Haden Church), the team leader, but before he and his band of marauding cohorts get down to the business of recovering the hardware buried beneath the house, these aliens start a war, but it's a pretend war, because they're more like playmates than adversaries. The children come after the Zarconians with paintball guns and rakes, and use fireworks to smoke them out of the vents. Even though they're supposedly the higher intelligence, Tom Pearson(Carter Jenkins), along with his siblings and cousins, fend the creatures off with a counterattack more suited for the realm of make-believe. Since the aliens are so diminuitive in size, and conspicuously, never attack the parents(a contrivance built into the film's scaled down approach to H.G. Wells), "Aliens in the Attic" should have gone the "Explorers"(the 1985 film starring River Phoenix) route and made the aliens only children masquerading as a scout team. That would better explain why the young Americans prove to be such formidable opponents to a species who promises imminent death but never delivers(fully mature aliens wouldn't hesitate to kill). "Aliens in the Attic" is unfocused; it wants to be both "The War of the Worlds" and "E.T."(the subplot between the little girl and Sparks). But despite the hodgepodge of influences, a kernel of intelligence perseveres above the post-modern fray, as the filmmaker, perhaps, is trying to say something about how technology plays too big a role in our lives. The aliens have all these cool toys, superior mechanics, but they're stupid(not quite "Critters"-stupid). That's why the story hinges around the father(Kevin Nealon) taking his family to the countryside for some fishing.

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