Reviews Film / Mac And Me

What happens when you try to mimic E. T. and get everything wrong and then some

This movie is trying hard to be the classic E. T.: Extra Terrestrial, but E. T. it most certainly is not. The first misstep is to screw up part of what made E. T. so appealing: its endearing alien.

What we get here is nothing like E. T.. Instead, these are the dumbest looking and acting aliens ever. They have wide-eyed faces and puffed-up cheeks that are stuck making the @.@ expression while simultaneously looking like they’re about to puke every second, have skin that resembles puke itself, shamble about like zombies, communicate with whistles including wolf whistles, and all appear severely mentally disabled. They seem unable to grasp the simple concept that grabbing a can from the bottom of a stack will cause the entire stack to collapse. Their hands seem to have difficulty picking up a simple object. Are these creatures capable of interstellar travel? The movie indicates that they were brought here by accident, so apparently not. These life forms must not have had much to worry about on their home planet, otherwise natural selection would have taken care of them a long time ago.

The movie also fails at storytelling. The characters are stupid, the comedy is bad, and there are parts that don’t make sense. How does a vacuum cleaner suck up an alien? (Never mind that the characters think it’s a ghost; it still shouldn’t suck up an alien like it were silly putty) How does the alien know to communicate by pointing to a symbol in a magazine that matches one on a sign near a wind farm? How do a bunch of incompetent feds blow up a supermarket by trying to shoot aliens instead? That’s not even video game logic.

Even the product placement fails. In E. T., Elliot introduces E. T. to his favorite food, Reese’s Pieces, in a way that feels natural and organic. Here, we instead randomly find out that Coca Cola revives dying aliens, and then we see… a dance party held at a McDonald's. How did that happen? Why? Ronald himself is even there. It’s so unnatural and forced. It makes me wonder, was McDonald's trying to make their own E. T. and boost the sales of their products in much the same way that Reese Piece’s sales increased after the release of E. T.? That would explain a lot.