A beautiful jewel of a planet. Alien invaders swooping down to steal precious resources and wipe out the natives. Oh, but look at that: it’s humans as the bad guys, as the alien invaders, in the CG-animated Battle for Terra, and that makes for a nice switcheroo, if one some human beings will howl at. How dare humans be the villains! After all, it’s not like humanity has a long legacy of genocide and invasion and cultural imperialism toward our own species! Why on Earth -- or beyond -- would we be so mean to nonhuman creatures?
I’m not at all surprised to discover the Terra director Aristomenis Tsirbas is Canadian, because if there’s one term that best characterizes Canadian science fiction, it’s “humanist.” As in “rational” and “equanimous” and “liberal,” and in this case, we have to extend the definition to “non-specieist”: or, not being bigoted against other species. Shockingly -- or, you know, not, if you’re any kind of genuine fan of science fiction, which, at its best, is about seeing the world from a not-typical perspective -- we see most of the events of Terra through the eyes of Mala (the voice of Evan Rachel Wood: Running with Scissors, The Upside of Anger), a native of the planet dubbed Terra by the ark-shipload of homo sapiens just arrived in orbit. In a sort of twist on Enemy Mine, Mala -- a floaty kind of being who lives in a city in the sky belonging to a culture that worships life and eschews war and appears to love music and art and aesthetics -- rescues a human fighter pilot, Jim Stanton (the voice of Luke Wilson: Henry Poole Is Here, 3:10 to Yuma), who crashes during an attack on Mala’s city. An uneasy form of friendship ensues, which can only lead to understanding, and sympathy, and all sorts of further suspicious feeling certain to doom any attempt to dominate by force.
I won’t overplay this: Terra is a tad overearnest and just a wee bit preachy in its insistence on playing up how the humans have destroyed their homeworld by gobbling up its resources, and in how the (to us) alien Terrans are so sweet and kind and nice and lovely in their rejection of violence, and in how they live in harmony with nature. I mean, I’m wholly approving of such sentiments, and still I have to say: Was the sledgehammer necessary?
But the heartfelt authenticity of Tsirbas and his screenwriter, Evan Spiliotopoulos, cannot be denied, and it more than overcomes whatever storytelling faults their approach has. They’ve created an alien race, in the Terrans, that is more alien -- both biologically and culturally -- than The Movies usually bothers with. (And, again, if you’re any kind of science fiction fan
