Meet Dave, you may have heard, was originally called Starship Dave, a much better title that actually gives you some clue what the film is about. Rival marketers say Fox ran away from the movie's premise in its marketing as well. "People who saw the ads had virtually no idea what the movie was about," writes Patrick Goldstein in the L.A. Times. "Whenever I quizzed various potential moviegoers about the film, I got a lot of puzzled shrugs." Because most of the movie takes place in New York City, the studio must have thought they could market it as an "earthly delight." This is a rare failure for the marketing department at Fox, which has had 16 movies in a row before Dave that were critically panned and did well at the box office. (Think Alvin and the Chipmunks, Jumper, The Happening, etc.)

The studio's discomfort with marketing a science fiction comedy stems from Fox co-chairman Tom Rothman's belief that "scifi films and films set in the future are box-office poison," writes Goldstein. Fox had been all set to make Used Guys, a scifi comedy featuring Ben Stiller and Jim Carrey and directed by Jay Roach (Austin Powers) — but then Rothman killed it. It was too expensive, but Rothman also thought nobody would go for the premise: men living in a women-ruled world. (Honestly, it does sound pretty hideous, especially with Stiller and Carrey as the men.) Soon after the project was axed, Rothman asked Goldstein to name one scifi comedy that had ever made money. (Goldstein didn't think of Men In Black until it was too late.)

Science fiction writer Alan Dean Foster pops up in the comments on Goldstein's article, somewhat scandalized that the studios don't think scifi comedies make money:

Didn't SPACEBALLS make money? THE INCREDIBLES? WALL-E? The genre is replete with wonderful stories that are both hysterically funny and true SF...many perfectly suitable for film adapation (I have two of mine under option right now). Now if the folks responsible for making such decisions only read books, instead of basing all their references on other films....

Now I'm curious: which two Foster books do you think Hollywood has optioned, and would they make good movies? I haven't read his work since I was a kid.
[LA Times]

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I went to see Meet Dave with rock-bottom expectations, and found myself sort of enjoying it. It's not exactly funny, per se, but it's fun. (Does that make sense? A comedy can be fun, without actually ever making you laugh.) If your kids want to go see a dumb movie, and you've already seen Wall-E twice, you could do worse than seeing Meet Dave. It's about as good as Murphy's other family-friendly mad-science comedies, the Nutty Professor and Doctor Doolittle.

So. Murphy plays the spaceship as well as its captain. As the ship, he's sort of a funky robot, moving jerkily, especially at first, and acting wooden. There's some pretty decent physical comedy around Murphy learning to move around. And as the captain, he's doing his Coming To America accent and acting silly. There are some cute gags, including Murphy printing counterfeit money with his butt, struggling to understand basic social skills, and winning a hot-dog eating contest with robotic speed. Etc. etc.

The basic storyline is about Murphy's crewmembers going native, so to speak. They're all inhabiting the body of this faux human, and over time they become more and more immersed in human culture. The security officer turns out to be gay and starts snapping his fingers and making the human-sized Murphy dance fabulously. A random black guy on the crew starts talking in a stereotypical hip hop way, and the second in command gets a makeover and becomes beautiful. Etc. etc. The only crewmember who doesn't go native is the second in command, played by The Office's Ed Helms in his least funny role ever. (Seriously, what little funny this movie has dries up completely whenever Helms is on screen. And I've liked him in other stuff.)

I'm pretty sure the original screenplay by MST3K's Bill Corbett had something interesting to say about inhabiting bodies and being disconnected from the body you live in, but that's pretty much gone in the version as filmed by Norbit director Brian Robbins. What's left is some cute gags about little guys in hamster balls operating arm and leg joints, a guy who lives in Eddie Murphy's butt, and the poor guy in a wetsuit who's in Eddie's mouth and gets doused with whatever Eddie swallows. (Sort of like the "sperm" sequence in Woody Allen's Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask.)

The biggest surprise in Dave is that its alien visitors are far from benign: their mission is to launch a golf-ball-sized device that will drain the Earth's oceans to generate a new power source for their dying planet, which runs on salt. (Just roll with it.) Due to their bumbling, they lose this device and have to befriend a widow and her cute son who is (wait for it, wait for it) being bullied, in order to get it back. (I'm actually racking my brains to think of the last scifi movie I saw with a kid who wasn't bullied.) Do you think Dave the extraterrestrial will rekindle the widow's faith in love? And help the kid stand up to those mean bullies? It's like you're clairvoyant!

Anyway, it's your basic fish-out-of-water comedy mixed with your hero-pretending-to-be-someone-else romantic comedy. But let's get back to the little people inside Dave. It's very self-consciously Star Trekky, especially in the early scenes — supposedly Murphy is a huge Trek fan, who's still sad he ended up not being the wacky sidekick in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

There's also a love triangle of sorts. The ship's captain starts having romantic feelings for the widow, Gina (Elizabeth Banks). But meanwhile, his third in command (Gabrielle Union) has the hots for him and starts dressing vampy and showing him Frank Capra movies to win him over. Will he choose the woman who's 1,000 times his size? Or the tiny woman who baked him cookies in the academy and helped him become the space hero he is today? In a way, this subplot is a bit of a broadside against inter-species dating, although it's not made terribly explicit.

So basically, Meet Dave has two great concepts wrapped together: the tiny people being menaced by cats and basketballs and cups of coffee that are gargantuan to them; and the human-looking robot that's full of little people. Either of those concepts alone would make it worth watching at three A.M. with your favorite intoxicant. Together, they may actually make it worth watching in the theater with your favorite intoxicant, if you can smuggle it in or consume it in advance. Probably not a movie you want to watch sober, unless you've got little kids.

It's really hard to tell. It sounds as though Dave just got swept under the carpet. All the Eddie buzz this week is about whether he's quitting movies for good. (Answer: No, he isn't.) And whether Beverly Hills Cop 4 will be R-rated. I have to admit, the trailer for Dave left me a tad underwhelmed, and the few early reviews are not encouraging. Says Westside Today:

Meet Dave is, sadly, not [worth watching]. The Naked Cowboy's cameo is funnier than the rest of the movie, and that's downright tragic.

Still, Murphy's last collaboration with Dave director Brian Robbins, Norbit, made $96 million domestically. And Murphy has already re-teamed with Robbins for a third film, called A Thousand Words. Due in 2009, it's the story of a blase guy (Murphy) who learns that he'll die as soon as he finishes saying a thousand words. So, I guess, he has to be very, very laconic.