Ayalaan

Everyone's talking about ET and Koi Mil Gaya as obvious sources of inspiration, but my best guess is .. writer-director R Ravi Kumar watched Greg Mottola's Paul (2011) at some point and thought Tamizhify-ing it would be a good idea. Considering the film has been in production hell for years, I'm glad at least the visual effects do not disappoint. PhantomFX does a pretty solid job, and it's indeed their hard work that sustains the film's watchability factor. I'll also give part of that credit to Siddharth, who voices Tattoo the cute alien.

But I wish the writing ingenuity that I witnessed in Ravi Kumar's Indru Netru Naalai was present here too. The screenplay is inconsolably generic, and even kids would find the plot developments overstuffed and the feeble attempts at humor quite lackluster. Sivakarthikeyan does alright in a role that only tries to milk the middle-class guy-next-door perception he has, while the usually funny sidekicks (Yogi Babu, Karunakaran) are not as fun this time around. The antagonists are one-note too, and a returning (femme fatale) Isha Koppikar is way more interesting than Sharad Kelkar here. Oh, Rakul Preet Singh is in there somewhere too, I almost forgot! Also, this is probably the most forgettable soundtrack that ARR has composed in recent memory.