Home follows the misadventures of a marshmallow-shaped alien race called the Boov. Breaking from usual trailer traditions, a new short on Youtube chronicles the backstory of the film itself, with the diminutive visitors on a seemingly endless quest to find a new home planet. Each one they stumble across quickly reveals itself to be ridden with predators or simply uninhabitable – one planet is just a giant head that tries to eat the spacecraft – and, sure enough, they end up heading to earth. Steve Martin heads the cast as Captain Shmek and seems to have returned to his long-forgotten profession of being funny. The short is hugely entertaining and, hopefully, this sort of preview technique will save Home from joining the most disappointing genre of all – the type of film that initially seems promising, up until the audience realizes that every single comic moment was included in the trailer and that the rest is stretched-out pillow fluff.
The arrival of the rather obnoxious Boov on Earth quickly proves disastrous for mankind. Being the first race that Shmek and friends are capable of overpowering, they’re quickly rounded up and relocated so that the softcore invaders can reorganize the planet into their new home. This is where the protagonist comes into play, in the form of a girl voiced by Rihanna for some reason. Having managed to escape the clutches of our new overlords, she encounters a fellow fugitive in Oh (voiced by Jim Parsons, which might be enough to cancel his co-star out and break even), an outsider banished from Boov society and in just as much trouble. The two of them promptly set off on a chaos-drenched adventure, revealing various as-yet unmentioned plot points as they go.
There’s always the possibility that this could be a swing and a miss but, considering the makers’ track record (e.g. How To Train Your Dragon), I think we can be optimistic.