On the road with an alien

Slam one down on the bar, scoop in some crushed ice and finish with a slug of grenadine. Paul is straight from the cocktail school of cinema. Which is to say, it contains a handful of familiar ingredients — the buddy movie, the road movie, Star Trek, stoner gags, granite-jawed FBI agents — all swept into the blender and spun, shaken and stirred into something that, in the end, turns out quite differently. Even by the brash standards of other sci-fi comedies, from Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953) to Galaxy Quest (1999), this film has chutzpah, delirious chutzpah.

Most of that chutzpah, and a good slice of the deliriousness, comes from the central pairing of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost — Paul’s leading actors, as well as its authors. Here, they transplant the endearing double act that they forged in the Channel 4 series Spaced (1999–2001), and tempered in Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2007), to American soil. So there they are, two British nerds, plotting a course through a comic-book convention to all the UFO sites scattered across the southern states. It is somewhere around Roswell, New Mexico, that they meet good ol’ eponymous Paul.

It says something that Paul — voiced by American funny man Seth Rogen — astonishes more for his personality than for the fact that he is entirely computer-generated. This is an alien who is in equal parts photo- realistic and cartoonish; whose iridescent eyes crease and twitch even as he sucks on a joint or extends a middle finger to his new friends. He’s like Bugs Bunny, only with a more wicked vocabulary. And if that sounds like a churlish use of special effects, it is also an effective one.