Aliens Abducted My Parents isn’t the be-all and end-all of filmmaking but the story at its heart is enough to warm the coldest of hearts.
WRITTEN BY ALEX GILSTON / JANUARY 23, 2023
When we as humans experience unexplainable trauma we often try to find fantastical ways to explain it away. In Aliens Abducted My Parents and Now I Feel Kinda Left Out Calvin (Jacob Buster) is convinced that when he was younger his parents were taken by aliens. Now ten years later he’s convinced that those same aliens are coming past Earth again so he can be reunited with his parents. Aliens Abducted My Parents isn’t the be-all and end-all of filmmaking but the story at its heart is enough to warm the coldest of hearts.
Itsy (Emma Tremblay) has moved to a new town with her family. She already has aspirations to flee the nest and make a name for herself as a journalist. The opportunity arises when she looks to enter a journalism contest for writing summer school at New York University. To be accepted she needs to write an article on the weirdest thing in her town. Enter Calvin, now a space-obsessed teenager who wears an astronaut suit to school, who she chooses to be the subject of the article. As she starts to get to know Calvin she sees the person behind the quirks and they both start to discover the truth surrounding his parent's disappearance together.
Aliens Abducted My Parents is as predictable as you might think, but there’s a strange comfort in it here. It’s nice to see the relationship between Itsy and Calvin blossom. Calvin is attempting to pry himself away from his obsession to find answers and he's able to find that in Itsy. You can clearly see the demographic it's aiming at, whether it's the cringe dialogue from the adults in the film or even the design of the aliens that eventually show up. It wouldn’t look out of place on a kid's tv channel on a weekend afternoon. In all fairness that’s where Aliens Abducted My Parents and Now I Feel Kinda Left Out might be the most appreciated.
STAR RATING
