Okay, I saw Disney’s Race to Witch Mountain and liked it, but I’m in my 40s and not really the target audience. I can offer the grown-up (and National Geographic) perspective, but to give you real insight into the movie, I’m sharing this blog with my 9-year-old son, Jeremy.

Jeremy: It is a great movie because it is about aliens, and aliens are pretty cool. It has a lot of funny scenes—people in the audience laughed. And there are a lot of car chases—the main characters are always driving in this beat-up taxi.

These two kid aliens, Seth and Sarah, are disguised as humans. At the beginning, after their space ship crashes, they rob a bank by using their powers to make an ATM spit lots and lots of money out. Their total cab fare is more than $700. They have enough to pay that amount plus a 500 percent tip in hundred dollar bills.

The movie was pretty cool because all the army’s bullets could not hurt the aliens. And when the aliens were holding hands with the humans, their power went into the humans, so the bullets could not hurt them either.

Another cool part was when the aliens find the cure for their planet inside an old shack. They go through many doors and they come out into what looked like a forest. And that is when the alien assassin turns up in the movie.

Mom: Here’s the Geographic angle. The alien kids come from a planet 3,000 light years away. That would be somewhere in our Milky Way galaxy. Their space ship is seen as impossibly large bright blur by a “far imaging” telescope in Bonn, Germany. Much of the action takes place on the Las Vegas strip and in the Nevada desert (sagebrush, obligatory scorpion and Gila monster, abandoned miner’s shack) off highway 95 northeast of the city (actually shot in Agua Dulce, California). FYI, the 1975 version of this film took place in northern California, by the ocean and in the mountains. The shift in location to the Nevada and California semi-desert works well because where else would aliens land? After all, Roswell isn’t too far way.

Race to Witch Mountain, like many sci-fi movies, also explores interesting emotional territory. The 1975 version echoes that era’s economic woes. One of the alien children reports their planet’s industry withered until the only thing they were producing was space ships. In the 2009 remake, the alien kids’ planet has been ruined by pollution and needs to be reoxygenated. Talk about climate change! To succeed, the alien scientists must conduct an experiment beneath the desert in Nevada. Why on Earth? Don’t ask. Meanwhile, the alien planet military would rather just invade our planet. Overall, though, this movie’s got more humor than anxiety.

Jeremy: Some of the funniest parts: When Jack Bruno is talking to the two kids from another planet and says, ‘I think of aliens as little green people with antennae who say, ‘Take me to your leader,’

Then I liked the part when they meet the junk yard dog, because at first the dog is barking at Jack Bruno, but then Sarah uses her mind power and tells the dog not to bark. And she takes the dog with them. And later the dog tells Jack through Sarah that he needs to use the bathroom and Jack does not want to stop. But the next scene shows the dog running back into the car—so he made Jack stop and got to use the bathroom! Then Jack asks the dog if he wants anything else, and the dog says, “A meaty treat.’”

I also like the part when the army is fighting the assassin alien who is trying to kill the two kid aliens, and one guy in the fight, who during the whole movie has been asking for weapon says, ‘I wish I had a gun,’ and a soldier gives him a really big gun, like a machine gun.

Mom: Race to Witch Mountain does not take the possibility of extraterrestrial life all that seriously. The one scientist at the U.F.O convention, who soon falls in love with cab driver Jack Bruno, is slightly batty astrophysicist whose obsession has cost her three university jobs and who persists in trying to present rejected journal articles to people who believe they have been abducted by aliens. And yet actual scientists in the real world are building big telescopes to search for Earth-like planets in other solar systems that might contain life. Race to Witch Mountain is a little ambivalent about whether we should be worried about what they might find.

Jeremy: The scariest part of the movie was when Jack tore off the alien assassin’s mask. His head looked like a big brain. He had weird eyes and a stretched out nose. He didn’t have a mouth.

I’ve seen aliens that look like squids, I‘ve seen the comic aliens with the big green faces and big black eyes. This was scarier.

But the good aliens, the kids, just looked like people. You couldn’t really tell they were aliens, except that they had powers and they were always using scientific words. They were from the same planet, though, so I wonder: “What do they look like underneath?

-Karen Lange

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