WasAnnon Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

Acensbart Excellent but underrated film

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Paynbob It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

PresNevins Space Chimps never made it to theaters here in Japan (it happens, with non-big-studio films...) so I just got around to seeing it on DVD 3 years late.The positives:Overall I quite liked the CGI. The chimps were all well done and nicely expressive, and the general visual mood of the film was charming. Kilowatt and the gummy aliens were both nifty.I also found myself generally liking the characters and their interactions by the end, mostly the supporting chimps and Kilowatt. Ham III's inevitable development fleshed him out acceptably. The scientists were somewhat interesting, though maybe just to grownups?The negatives:I didn't much like Ham III. They touched on why he lived his life the way he did, but that never sunk in enough to cancel out his first (and middle, and almost to the end) impression of being pretty much a jerk.The story was very straightforward with few surprises (a polite way of saying "predictable.") The dialogue was equally straightforward, with most characters saying more or less what you expect them to say at that point in the film. Ham does some reckless thing and makes a mess of things, Ham hits on Luna and she's exasperated at him, we've all seen this stuff before. Exceptions were Zartog and Titan's interactions which I found the most innocently charming parts of the movie, along with the three scientists, though the latter did seem to be floating off in their own story universe disconnected from the rest of the film a bit too much.Zartog was just kind of irrelevantly bad because he's bad, and no-one else in his village was more than an extra, so his non-sequitur freezing of random aliens wound up having no emotional impact on me whatsoever. When he and Titan were interacting he started to become interesting, but there simply wasn't enough of that to fill him out as the main bad guy.Also the design of the main alien species was visually weak, and that detracted from things. They were just nondescriptly blobby green people, more the kind of design you'd use for an incidental alien species rather than the main alien presence. Nothing particularly appealing or even memorable.What most weakened the film was the pacing. Dialogue has a natural flow to it, but here it seemed like most of the lines wound up packed next to each other way too tightly. Maybe to minimize the amount of CGI they had to create (keeping the budget reasonable)? It simply didn't feel like the characters ever had enough time to absorb each other's lines before it was time to say their own lines in response, and it wound up feeling like everybody was just reading the script at each other for 80 minutes.---Despite my focus on the negatives above, overall I wound up liking the characters in spite of the presentation, and by the end I wanted the film to have been more solidly put together than it was. I wanted to know these characters better. Maybe at 80 minutes it was inevitably rushed, but the structural problems were deeper than that. On the surface level (CG, acting, scoring) it more than crossed the "good enough" line in the first couple of minutes, so it's that much more frustrating that it didn't pull it off on a more emotionally-satisfying level too.I'd give it a 6 out of 10. Worth renting, may or may not be worth owning, probably wasn't worth seeing in the theater. Probably a good thing it didn't come to Japan; in the year of Ponyo and Wall-E it would have been annihilated.

tenzinmail When I saw this film in the cinema I loved it and now I have the DVD. It is just brilliant. It's just so funny. How can people not find the main monkey not Hilarius? He has the best lines and is a total twit, and is very funny. I was very surprised that it was rated so low, and after reading other reviews it seemed like people didn't find it funny. Their opinion (not a very good one, mind). If you haven't seen it, you might hate it but you might love it and think it's great. (nothing to do with film now) IMDb! How are we supposed to write 10 lines about a film? Come on! who wants to read a long review? Make it 3 lines! Sheesh!

ccthemovieman-1 Have you seen movies that almost wore you out after 45 minutes? Im talking about too much action, too much bickering and yelling between people, too much happening the screen, too loud.....just too much. You want to cry, "enough, already....give us a few lulls!" That's how found this cute-at-first animated film which starts off great but quickly spirals into the "too much" category and never lets go. Maybe I'm just too old for this sort of thing; maybe this is what five or ten-year-olds want....but I'm not surprised this animated film wasn't a hit - with adults or some kids.Don't get wrong: there are a number of funny lines in here, the animation is great in spots, and some of the characters (i.e. "Kilowatt") are very appealing. It's just that the film feels rushed, right from the start. One can never just settle down and enjoy the stories, character and artwork. This story needed more lulls.It also need less ("wink" "wink") inside, pretentious remarks by the writers, who tried too hard to get their PC agendas in here throughout. The "heroes," the space chimps, were always bickering among themselves. That led to some funny put-down lines but also got tiring, too, after almost an hour of it. The villain, "Zartog," meanwhile, was just plain stupid. Nobody that silly/dumb, even in science fiction, could rule anyone.In all, it was just too disjointed and too frenetic - all the while being predictable - to enjoy. Although only 80 minutes in length, I found myself often checking how much time was left in the film.

mungflesh The writing in Space Chimps feels very Family Guy esquire, which I am not at all a fan of.Whilst there's (virtually) no offensive language or crudeness, the gags almost solely depend on quick-fire references to other films and TV shows etc. For me, this gets tedious and is a very lazy way to write comedy IMO. For my 3 1/2 year old, it's not possible for him to understand any of the references. He's too young for Space Chimps and if I had known, I wouldn't have taken him. Even for 8 year-olds I think the references would be way before their time. It's as if the gags are written ONLY for adults, which to me puts the film in a no-mans land where it is neither for kids nor their parents.The way CGI films should be made, is that a script meant for real actors, which is technically too costly to achieve "in the flesh", can then be made using CGI. In reality, there's probably a think-tank of people who design the visuals and then the script, which is why many of these ventures are weak.