Paul (film)

Paul
United Kingdom poster
Directed by	Greg Mottola
Written by	Simon Pegg Nick Frost
Produced by	Nira Park Tim Bevan Eric Fellner
Starring	Simon Pegg Nick Frost Seth Rogen Jason Bateman Kristen Wiig
Cinematography	Lawrence Sher
Edited by	Chris Dickens
Music by	David Arnold
Production companies	Relativity Media Working Title Films Big Talk Pictures
Distributed by	Universal Pictures
Release dates	14 February 2011 (2011-02-14) (United Kingdom) 18 March 2011 (2011-03-18) (United States)
Running time	104 minutes
Countries	Template:Film Spain Template:Film France Template:Film UK Template:Film US
Language	English
Budget	$50 million
Box office	$25,796,299

Paul is a 2011 science fiction comedy film directed by Greg Mottola and starring an ensemble cast headed by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. It was also written by Frost and Pegg. The film received generally postive reviews. It was the UK's No.1 box office hit in its first week, surpassing Gnomeo & Juliet.

Plot

The film opens in the United States in 1947, with a dog named Paul scratching to be let outside, where the sky is covered in eerie lights. When his owner, a young girl, lets him out, he is crushed by a crash landing spaceship. The girl pulls an alien (voiced by Seth Rogen) from the wreckage, and names him Paul. He is taken away by the Government and held prisoner for 60 years. He eventually decides to escape from his holding place, Area 51.

Two English comic book nerds named Graeme Willy (Simon Pegg) and Clive Gollings (Nick Frost) have travelled to America for the annual Comic-Con convention and to visit all the sites of major extraterrestrial importance. On the way to their second site, they stop off at a café, where two hunters confront them. As they hurriedly leave, they reverse into the hunters' car, leaving a dent. At the next site, they see a car blasting towards them and, believing it to be the hunters, they speed off in their RV. Eventually, the car catches up, and they realize that it is not the hunters. As it overtakes, it speeds off the road, rolls several times, and comes to a halt in a field. The two shocked men get out to investigate. When they realize that the vehicle is empty and begin phoning the emergency services, they hear a voice saying 'I shouldn't do that if I were you'. They turn around, and a little grey alien comes into view, smoking a cigarette, and tells Clive to put the phone down. Clive faints, and Paul, introducing himself, explains to Graeme that he is on the run and needs their help. Graeme agrees to let him come. When Clive wakes up, he is not happy about the idea, but is eventually brought around.

Along the way, they are forced to take with them a Christian named Ruth (Kristen Wiig), who, until Paul shows her his memories, believes that there is nothing outside Earth and that God created humans. When he shatters her faith in Christianity, she suddenly becomes eager to 'sin', which she was not allowed to do before by her controlling father, who pursues them. She initially doesn't trust Paul, but to prove himself trustworthy, he heals her eye, as she has been blind in it since the age of four. The whole way, three secret agents, apparently eager to kill Paul under orders from a woman over the radio, have tailed them.

After a while, Paul decides to return to the girl whose dog he crashed his ship on and who subsequently saved his life, who is now an old woman, Tara Walton (Blythe Danner). She turns her gas cooker on but never gets round to doing anything with it, because they are interrupted by the agents. As the motley crew drives off with Paul, one of the agents shoots at them, and the gas ignites, destroying the house. Another agent catches up with them but drives off a bridge and is apparently killed.

By this time, Paul has revealed that his people are ready to pick him up, and he is heading to the rendezvous. When they get there, they set off a signal and wait. Eventually, eerie orange lights show up over the surrounding trees, and everyone believes that it is Paul’s race. However, it is an army helicopter, with 'the Big Guy' (Sigourney Weaver) on board, who is actually the woman commanding the three agents. As she and three troops backing her up move to shoot Paul, the third agent, Lorenzo Zoil (Jason Bateman), who turns out to be working for Paul, bursts out of the trees and takes out the men, but is shot in the shoulder. Tara knocks out 'the big guy', but Ruth's father Moses (John Carroll Lynch) appears with a shotgun and shoots Graeme dead. Paul heals him, but inflicts the damage to himself (a possible side effect of his healing powers mentioned earlier in the film). Paul then collapses, exhausted. For a while, the other characters stand around his apparently lifeless body sprawled on the grass. Then, coughing, Paul props himself up, having healed himself. 'The big guy' regains consciousness, but she is almost immediately crushed by an alien ship. Paul leaves in the ship, and takes Tara with him.

During the credits, Graeme, Clive and Ruth are shown two years later, again at a comic convention, promoting their new mega-successful comic book, "Paul".

Cast

• Simon Pegg as Graeme Willy
• Nick Frost as Clive Gollings
• Seth Rogen as the voice of Paul
• Jason Bateman as Special Agent Lorenzo Zoil
• Kristen Wiig as Ruth Buggs
• Bill Hader as Agent Haggard
• Jane Lynch as Pat Stevenson
• Sigourney Weaver as "The Big Guy"
• Blythe Danner as Tara Walton
• Mia Stallard as Young Tara
• Joe Lo Truglio as O'Reilly
• John Carroll Lynch as Moses Buggs
• David Koechner as Gus
• Jesse Plemons as Jake
• Jeffrey Tambor as Adam Shadowchild
• Luke Jackson as Ford
• Paula LaBaredas as Princess Leia
• Chris Bentley as Highway Patrolman (uncredited)
• Justin Reed as Comic Con Guest

Pegg and Frost have described the film as a love letter to Steven Spielberg. Mentioning the project to Spielberg he suggested he might make cameo appearance, and a scene was added to include him. According to Robert Kirkman, he, along with Invincible co-creator Cory Walker and current Invincible artist Ryan Ottley, had a cameo in the movie.

Production

To help with the script Pegg and Frost went on their own road trip across America and used ideas from it to add to the script.

Principal photography wrapped on September 9, 2009, with additional scenes filmed in July 2010 at the Albuquerque Convention Center, which was designed to look like the 2010 San Diego Comic-Con. After obtaining permission to use the Comic-Con brand, the settings had to be changed to avoid crowds and extras were used to portray attendees since there had been some issues regarding filming inside San Diego's actual convention center. As a result, only exterior shots of the San Diego Convention Center were filmed on the streets of Downtown, San Diego.

During filming, Joe Lo Truglio was a stand-in for the character Paul, the only character who was created by CGI. Seth Rogen did some motion capture in pre-production and voice work during post-production.

Release

A teaser trailer was released on October 18, 2010. The teaser trailer featured the song "Just the Two of Us" by Grover Washington, Jr. and "Run With the Wolves" by The Prodigy. It was shown before certain screenings of Vampires Suck, Let Me In, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1, Burke and Hare, The Green Hornet and The Social Network in the UK. The trailer featured the music "It Came Out of the Sky" by Creedence Clearwater Revival and "All Over The World" by the Electric Light Orchestra.

The film had its world premiere in London on 7 February 2011.

Reception

The film has received generally positive reviews. Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 70% based on 38 reviews, with an average rating of 5.9 out of 10.

Empire gave four stars out of five stating, "Broader and more accessible than either Shaun Of The Dead or Hot Fuzz, Paul is pure Pegg and Frost - clever, cheeky and very, very funny. You'll never look at E. T. in the same way again." SFX also gives the film four stars out of five, saying "the film veers dangerously close to alienating (no pun intended) all but its geek core audience, [though] the more obvious concessions to a mainstream crowd [are] never enough to derail the film’s laugh-a-minute ride"; SFX also calls it a "triumph of visual effects, convincing characterisation and bad taste humour."

Peter Bradshaw gave the film two stars out of five and called it a "goofy, amiable piece of silliness" exhibiting "self-indulgence" and possessing a "distinct shortage of real gags." On the same scale Nigel Andrews gave the film only one star, calling it a "faltering extraterrestrial knockabout." The Independent grades the film two stars out of five, saying "Pegg is likeable as usual, Frost more doltish than usual, and Kristen Wiig an appealing convert from Bible thumper to ladette", and notes that "from time to time, clever ideas rear their heads—like the idea that 'Paul' has been the brains behind all SF and UFO initiatives for the last 30 years, including Close Encounters and The X-Files—but they soon return to the film's default setting of laddish japes and a conviction that the word 'cocksucker' will always get a laugh."

External links

• Official website
• Paul at AllMovie
• Paul at Box Office Mojo
• Paul at IMDb
• Paul at Metacritic
• Paul at Rotten Tomatoes