Film Review | Paul

I don’t know how common this is, but when I was a kid, ET scared the living daylights out of me. It wasn’t a fear of aggression – I wasn’t that far gone into hallucinatory childhood fear that I would, with instinctive paranoid fervour, recast the lovable, bug-eyed alien in a hostile role – but rather, an uncomfortable feeling not unlike the creeping sensation of being watched, by the unknown.

And when, not that much later, I became obsessed with alien conspiracy theories (remember ‘X Factor’ magazine? Nothing to do with Cowell’s empire, I assure you…) it was less out of any relish – perverse or otherwise – than out of pre-emptive terror: if I didn’t watch the bug-eyed freaks, they would be watching me.

It’s safe to say that experience has obliterated both fears as the years went by: the hard fact of burgeoning adulthood is, of course, that there are far more pressing (though, sadly, also far more mundane) things to be scared of in life than anonymous bands of speculative space aliens.

All of which made me approach Paul with far less enthusiasm than I would any other Simon Pegg and Nick Frost collaboration. I’ve been a fan of the British geek comedy duo ever since I watched Shaun of the Dead… which in turn led me to their fantastic (but alas, all too brief) Channel 4 sitcom Spaced, and of course their superlative cop film parody Hot Fuzz.

Like them, I’m partial to a bit of geekdom too: I chuckle at most of the references they cram their features with… so much so that it could be considered a spectator sport.

But Paul draws heavily from Steven Spielberg’s alien canon… it’s not just ET that’s referenced, but Close Encounters of the Third Kind too, as is evidenced in the film’s opening.

It is a balmy night in a rural patch of American country. A girl hears noises and lights from the sky, and her dog trots out of the house, disturbed. The girl calls out to ‘Paul’… until the pooch appears to engulfed by extraterrestrial SFX.

Fast forward to the present day. We meet Graeme Willy (Pegg) and Clive Gollings (Frost), two British fanboys enjoying a pilgrimage to the American home of geekdom: the San Diego Comic Con. But while the socially inept duo – whose only true claim to any sort of endeavour comes in the form of an unpublished manuscript about a three-breasted alien warrior queen – revel in the geek Mecca, they have bigger fish to fry: as part of their giddy pilgrimage to the States, they aim to visit all the major UFO ‘hotspots’.

But just outside of the infamous Area 51, the duo end up with more than they bargained for, when they actually stumble upon an alien from another planet. Paul (voiced by Seth Rogen) conforms to physical stereotype in every way (a fact amusingly exploited later on), but his slacker ways come as a surprise to the duo.

The otherwise amiable Paul, however, has landed the duo – which quickly becomes a trio after they end up saddled with a one-eyed Creationist Ruth (Kirsten Wiig) – into a spot of serious trouble, with FBI agents hot on their trail.

There’s no getting around the fact that this is Pegg and Frost’s ‘going to America’ film. Which basically means that they spend a good amount of time ‘freeloading’ off of American road-comedy film conventions, so that a lot of the idiosyncrasies we know them for get muted underneath the dazzle.

But to be fair, Paul should be viewed as a collaboration. Pegg and Frost only wrote Paul, it was Greg Mottola (Superbad, Adventureland) who directed, and his deft hand at noughties slacker humour (of which, not-so-incidentally, Rogen is a key proponent), is definitely felt here.

So while it feels like a slightly compromised version of their previous cinematic outings, there is much to enjoy in Paul, if taken as an adolescent romp. Being charmed by the affable Paul certainly made me feel less apprehensive about my ET phobia. Can’t say the same if you were ever a true fan of Spielberg’s saccharine opus though.