a review of 天降神兵

This one is mostly interesting as a curious mid-80s artifact, both of Lucasfilm's awkward years immediately post-"Return of the Jedi", as well as the heady times following the success of "Ghostbusters", when the studios felt emboldened to do some really weird, idiosyncratic stuff in its wake. Having said that, the story and production design feel like a puree of the high-concept sci-fi comedies of the time, everything from the aforementioned Reitman film to "Buckaroo Banzai" and "Repo Man," with perhaps just a dash of "E.T" in Howard himself, who is actually a pretty decent creature effect in his own right. It mostly strikes a cutesy kid-comedy tone, with recurring "adult" notes that feel out of place with the rest of the wacky hijinks. Thompson and Robbins manage to deliver appealing performances with their characters, but otherwise the movie feels both undercooked and overlong with an 110 minute runtime. There's enough flabby sequences in this movie (the hot tubs! the airplane chase! the down-home sushi bar!) that they could have easily trimmed it to 80-90 minutes and not really lost anything that would have been missed.