A 3-D Message for Peace

by Gaetana Caldwell-Smith / June 2009

The 3-D animated film "Battle for Terra" is set about 300 years in the future. It contains an antiwar message, but generally doesn’t hit you over the head with it. The film gives a unique twist to the star-wars-movie genre, in that the humans carry out the role of alien invaders, while the non-human "monsters" are intelligent and peace-loving.

Although shot in 3-D, the film doesn’t startle you with objects flying off the screen, or punches and kicks aimed directly at you, making you feel stupid by ducking. Rather, it gives you the feeling of being underwater with everything moving around you. Some scenes feature things falling gently out of the sky—like snow, leaves, or space dust—that you feel you can reach out and touch.

The inhabitants of Terra, a small planet in a far-away solar system, spend their time playing music and engaging in other peaceful activities. They, along with animals—monstrous, benign, whale-like creatures with shark’s fins, and strange birds—float along as though through a clear gelatin of lovely pastel skies.

Terrians resemble second-stage tadpoles, with lovely round white faces with huge, limped Walter Keane eyes, and large sensuous mouths. Terrians undulate through space and live in what look like hollowed out eucalyptus trees, floating in and out through holes like birds. The only visible land one actually sees is at the end of the film when the human aliens create a small domed city on the planet.

Teenage Terrian Mala (voice: Evan Rachel Wood), her boyfriend Senn (Justin Long), and other Terrians fly contraptions straight out of a Leonardo de Vinci sketchbook. The Elders wear colorful pill-box hats and the proverbial robes. Terrians have no legs, just wide, flat, triangular tails: bodies and clothes being all one piece, like Popeye’s Sweet Pea.

Humans destroyed planet Earth with their factories, mining, oil-drilling, nuclear production, and wars, so survivors built themselves The Ark, an ugly planet-like spaceship consisting of clunky metallic rings revolving in opposite directions to maintain a gravitational pull. Strangely, the only survivors from Earth appear to be Americans, and practically all of them that we see are white men—mostly Marine-type soldiers. One of the failings of the film is that it doesn’t illustrate how ordinary, everyday people might live on such a place.

The Ark is falling apart, but luckily its human occupants discover Terra in time to save themselves. The drawback is that there’s no oxygen on the planet. General Hemmer (Brian Cox), stages a coup d’etat and orders a military invasion.

At first, Terra’s inhabitants greet the humans as gods sent to save them in a kind of mass Rapture. (It is never made clear what they need saving from.) But never having known warfare, they do not understand why the humans are dropping things that explode and kill them.

A pilot, James Stanton, voiced by Luke Wilson, crash-lands his spacecraft and is wounded. Mala drags his beefy American body back to her home, devises an oxygen-producing environment for him, and nurses him back to health. Meanwhile, her father is kidnapped and taken to The Ark.

A Wall E-like robot, Giddy (David Cross), with a C3PO delivery, makes an appearance. He sees his military creators killing and bombing Terrians, and on Jim’s instructions, turns to help Mala. Jim’s brother, Stewart (Chris Evans), keeps Jim in line with constant "Hoo-Rahs!" and by feeding him all the patriotic malarkey we hear to this day about how we all must go with the program outlined by our leaders to defend our Homeland to make America safer from "people who want to kill us."

The Terrians fight back. When Jim sees that Mala’s life is in danger, he starts questioning his country’s motives for killing these peaceful “aliens.” The Terrians also have a change of heart. After a tragedy that impacts the beings from both planets, their leaders agree that humans and Terrians can live in peace, share resources—and create, rather than destroy.

Consider the millions of heart-rending tragedies here and around the world that have occurred, perpetrated by the U.S. government since 9/11. Would that we could petition Michelle and Barack Obama to take Malia and Sasha to see this delightful (for the most part) film—and that Obama and all the Washington politicians and generals proceed to take the film’s message to heart. Dream on.