My current fav snark circulating social media (other than the hilarious penguin stuff) is: Aliens are going to be super confused when they show up threatening to overthrow our leaders and we’re all stoked and offer to help.
Ya think? Just about anything these days is better than watching the stock market, our democracy, and basic human decency continuing to take a nose-dive into a fascist black hole of hell, but this week I got lucky and found yet another road trip movie, this one featuring…a snarky alien!
I somehow missed seeing Paul—perhaps due to the odd name that offers no clue that it’s a sci-fi comedy about an extraterrestrial—when it was released in 2011. Then again, I was living in Minnesota at the time, not watching much sci-fi and not knowing I’d soon live not far from Area 51,where I would begin writing a novel series about snarky aliens conjured from my own imagination. Or that my most recent Other Worldly offering, Aliens Watch, would also involve an RV road trip…through both Minnesota and Wisconsin.
As an aside, I stumbled upon Paul on Tubi after diving into the first of three seasons of Relic Hunter (1999-2002), a fun, adventurous, and often informative TV series starring Tia Carrere. Why Tubi literally “featured” a program that it was fixing to disappear is beyond me, and also beyond annoying. I guess I’ll now never know if they eventually did an episode involving alien-related relics. Seriously, Tubi, why?
Anyway, the online overview of Paul describes the plot as follows: For the past 60 years, a wisecracking alien named Paul (never realized the voice was Seth Rogan as I watched it) has resided at a top-secret military base in America’s UFO heartland (Area 51 of Nevada fame). When Paul decides he has had enough of Earth, he escapes from the compound and hops on the first handy vehicle—a rented RV manned by two British sci-fi nerds names Graeme and Clive (I’m introducing a new character for my next OW novel, Alien Origins, named Graeme. Uncanny?). With federal agents and the father of an accidental kidnap victim on their tail, the two hatch a crazy plan to help Paul return to his spaceship.
It turns out this father of the kidnapped woman, Ruth Buggs (now there’s a name) played by Kristen Wiig, is a gun-toting Christian fanatic with violent tendencies. Kind of like the alien-hating Armed Evangelicals and HUMANS FIRST! thugs in my novels.
The best clever surprise of this film, unfortunately often rife with too many unnecessarily juvenile male-oriented wisecracks cluttering up razor-sharp wit about human cluelessness and stupidity as noted by Paul, is cameo cast members who remain distinctly familiar from iconic films about extraterrestrials, especially Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Not to mention Paul’s request for a road trip snack known as Reese’s Pieces, reminiscent of E.T. the Extraterrestrial.
Paul himself appears classically as the diminutive creatures often called little green men or Grays, with the oversized bulbous head atop a spindly body, though his bluish eyes are quite human-like. He has a very special ability that won’t be revealed as a spoiler herein. Ironically, it’s kind of the opposite of a special skill possessed by Jules, an alien in another film called Jules, mentioned recently in this blog.
I just watched Jules for the third time (via Paramount Showtime) because it is now my absolute favorite extraterrestrial movie. But what is it with naming films by the human name given to the alien featured in them? I didn’t have a clue what Jules was about for the same reason, hence I missed it in 2023 when it first came around.
The actual seeking-out-alien-sites road trip part of Paul was also raucous fun as the fellas in the RV evaded chase by government goons (one is none other than Jason Bateman) and homophobic rednecks across Nevada along the Extraterrestrial Highway (SR 375) and into Utah, eventually headed for a location that Paul tells the Brits they’ll know when they see it. That would also be a spoiler of a reveal, so you’ll have to watch the film to see where they ultimately end up.
One kitsch pitstop highly sought-after by the two Brits—one of whom happens to be a sci-fi writer—other than an alien-themed café in Rachel, Nevada, with a priceless waitress cameo by the fabulous Jane Lynch, involves the mysterious bullet-proof “Black Mailbox” in Alamo, also along the Extraterrestrial Highway.
The Black Mailbox has long been a meeting spot for UFO and alien aficionados hoping to catch a glimpse of either, though I’ve never been there—nor did I need to visit it to see a UFO in Nevada—but the mailbox isn’t actually black, as you can see by the photo accompanying this blog post. The original mailbox was black, but due to folks constantly rifling through it, it was replaced with a more secure white mailbox. Or so the story goes.
In any event, I can definitively say that the cast, scenery, and storyline of this road-trip-with-alien adventure didn’t disappoint. Especially when you realize it’s rooted in theories about Area 51 harboring aliens who crashed to Earth.
We sure could use a few good-guy-yet-badass aliens coming to overthrow our bad-guy buffoons these days. My guess is they wouldn’t be much of a challenge for extraterrestrials—intellectually or otherwise. How stupid must you be to levy tariffs on islands occupied solely by penguins?
Now wouldn’t that make a great movie? Have aliens team up with the penguins to fight back against tyrannical dipshits—and fight dirty.