Here's the official synopsis:

When the peaceful inhabitants of the beautiful planet Terra come under attack from the last surviving members of humanity adrift in an aging spaceship, the stage is set for an all-out war between the two species for control of the planet. But will an unlikely friendship between a rebellious young Terrian (Wood) and an injured human pilot (Wilson) somehow convince their leaders that war is not the answer?

The DVD for this pretty little CG film will be out on September 22. It may be a bit plot-heavy, but it's a fun world to discover. Check it out if only for David Cross' adorable robot voice for Giddy.

So in Aliens In The Attic (formerly known as They Came From Upstairs) a family goes on vacation in the countryside, only to find that four aliens have gotten there first. And these aliens are the vanguard of an alien invasion fleet, although one of them really just wants to make friends. There's Sparks, the friendly one, Skip, the mean one, Spike, the dumb one, and Razor, the female one. Here's the UK trailer, with more details on these incredibly vivid personalities. Plus mind-control and crotch shots!

So seriously, what's the deal with us having to battle cute aliens all the time? First there was Battle For Terra, where we invaded the planet of lovable ETs. Then there's this movie, where the cute aliens invade us back. And then there's Planet 51, where the Rock crashes on a planet of cute aliens and gets mistaken for an invader. And finally, there's James Cameron's Avatar, where we invade the cute aliens again. What gives?

Note: As with last year's similar poll, we're not including movies that are expected to be hits, like Star Trek or Terminator. If you want to make a case in the comments as to why you'd be surprised if Star Trek makes tons of money, go ahead. I was debating whether to include Wolverine, but a lot of people seem somewhat pessimistic about its chances now.

Have you never heard of some of these movies? More information about Pandorum is here. More info on District 9 is here. More about Moon is here. And here's Game.

In the clip, Mala has stowed away on a human ship that is rapidly falling apart. With the help of Giddy the robot (voiced by David Cross), she pilots a cruiser out of the last remaining vessel of human life, back to her home planet Terra, where the humans have plotted a take-over.

The Battle For Terra will be out May 1st.

There's a lot to like here, including super-splashy space battles that will probably look great in 3-D, and a dark storyline about a destroyed Earth. But the style of the animation, and the excessively loveable aliens, leave me a bit cold.

We reviewed Battle For Terra last May, when it was still called just plain Terra and it debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival. (The review is very spoilery, so be warned.) Short version: cute aliens, even cuter robot, but it gets super dark and weird with all the space battles, and the ending is hard to swallow. As we pointed out, this film is part of a mini-trend of movies where humans are the invaders and aliens are forced to defend their homelands from us.

It also seems like a very post-Wall-E movie: a grim post-apocalyptic future in which humanity is cast out into space, but somehow made palatable by extra loads of cuteness. [Giant Freakin Robot]

As I said above, the story of evil humans coming and despoiling an alien planet is nothing new in written science fiction. Off the top of my head, there's Ursula LeGuin's The Word For World Is Forest, among others. I'm almost done reading Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods (review coming soon) which deals with this theme. But I can't think of too many movies which have handled this type of storyline. (Enemy Mine, I guess.)

We still don't know all of the plot details for James Cameron's Avatar, coming in 2009, but an early "scriptment" that's reputed to be real includes a lot of information. In a nutshell, Earth is ruined due to centuries of exploitation, and we've used up all our resources. So we decide to go and plunder the mineral wealth of the planet Pandora, whose atmosphere is poisonous to us. Humans can only walk around on Pandora by growing special alien bodies, akin to the native Na'vi aliens. The humans can control their own vat-grown Na'vi bodies, which are called avatars. (We don't know how much of this stuff survives in the final script, but Sigourney Weaver's comments about her character having "her own avatar" make it sound as though it's still there in some form.)

In addition to these surrogate aliens, the humans have also landed some bloodthirsty troops who hate the natives and want to wipe them out. So there's a conflict between the Avatar-using humans, who want to understand the natives (who are basically Native Americans) and the power-armor-using troops, who want to bulldoze all the natives' sacred lands and kill them all. This leads to a speech by our hero, Josh:

Pandora is not Hell, it's Eden. And Eden is being bulldozed and stripmined and raped. We have no right. We are the aliens here. We are the space monsters.

If that sounds too subtle for you, then there's Terra, which we covered the other day. The new full-length animated film is about humans coming to terraform a planet of peaceloving aliens, after Earth has become basically uninhabitable. We already terraformed Venus and Mars, but then the planets had a huge civil war. So now we have to come and use our transforming device to turn Terra's helium atmosphere into oxygen.

Are you seeing a trend here? The stories about humans as scourge of the cosmos are what come after the post-apocalyptic Earth stories. We ruin our own planet, so we have to go and fuck up someone else's planet. (That's also the storyline in the Winterson book, where Orbus is about to become unable to support human life.) There could also be some guilt about the Iraq war and our various other foreign adventures, which we could be excising.

There's also the remake of the original humans-are-assholes movie The Day The Earth Stood Still, coming this December, in which peaceful aliens warn us not to take our asshole ways out into space. And there's a new direct-to-DVD sequel to Starship Troopers coming out in a couple of months. In the original Troopers, director Paul Verhoeven's aim was to show that humans were the aggressors and the bugs were simply reacting to human colonies encroaching on their territory. This message flew over a lot of people's heads, so maybe Troopers scriptwriter Ed Neumeier (who's directing the new movie) will make it more blatant this time around.

And then there's also the animated Planet 51, starring the Rock, in which the peaceful aliens think the humans are there to invade and despoil their planet. But they're wrong... or are they?

I guess there's not enough examples there to argue that this is a sweeping new trend. And of course the post-apocalyptic Earth movie has one major advantage over the alien world epic: it's cheap to film, since you can make a post-apocalyptic landscape almost anywhere you can find some rubble.

Director Aristomenis Tsirbas' feature length movie was sparked from its original short (also called Terra). It begins on the planet Terra. A peaceful society of tadpole beings with large, innocent eyes and no legs inhabits a world where the atmosphere is made up of helium. The Terrians live together up high in a tree/mushroom village among flying whale-esque creatures that swim among the clouds.

Giddy, Mala, and Lt. James Stanton from Terra.

Among the mushroom homes lives the main character Mala (Evan Rachel Wood), a rambunctious young lady fighting with her father, Roven (Dennis Quaid), for the freedom to do what she wants. They get into a big argument over Mala's passion for gadgetry and he worries that her tinkering will offend the gods. Moments after the big blow out, large spaceships descend upon the Terra city capturing frightened Terrians in their green tractor beams. Some citizens scream and hide while others call it, "a miracle" and willingly hover in the ships' way hoping for capture. Mala's father is taken by one of the ships (and to think they just fought, how timely!). Eager to get her father back Mala follows one downed space craft and comes face-to-tadpole with the human Lt. James Stanton (Luke Wilson). Stanton has little air and quickly passes out, looking for answers Mala sneaks him back into her village.

Stanton was accompanied by his robot companion/helper named Giddy. This endearing little orange robot scurries on all fours with jet propeller feet and a communicator tail. Giddy is by far the best character in Terra. Voiced by comedian David Cross, Giddy is the mediator between both sides and is the only one offering logic. His robot eyes beam understanding into Mala's brain and low and behold she can speak English. After figuring out how to turn her helium atmosphere into an oxygen tent for Stanton, Mala agrees to fix Stanton's ship but in exchange he must bring her to her father.

During the whole getting-to-know-you scene, Stanton explains why all the dramatics about Terra. The human race used up all the resources up on Earth and then terraformed Venus and Mars. But it wasn't enough, a civil war started between the two planets and everything was destroyed. Now the refugees have to live on a run-down space ship called the Arc and travel the universe in search of a new planet. Too bad for the Terrians, because the humans are voting on whether or not they should colonize it — which would mean destruction for all life on Terra as they convert with their scary "transformer" spider machine the helium atmosphere into oxygen.

Meanwhile back on the Arc a power crazed General Hemmer (Brian Cox) declares martial law and decides it's in everyones best interest if the humans kill everyone on Terra and take it for themselves. Throwing the president in the brig, he begins preparing for the war at hand. Mala and Stanton make it back to Stanton's ship only to discover that the captured Terrians are being tortured. Cut to ridiculously overdramatic scene where Mala finds her weakend father only to have him take her human gun and turn it on his captors while locking Mala in another room. This of course leads to him blowing a hole in the wall and they all get sucked into space.

So Mala is now pissed and Stanton tries to explain to other humans that the Terrians are a peaceful people, but it falls on deaf ears. Mala almost dies...again, until Stanton orders Gibby to protect Mala and Gibby brings Mala back home. Back on her home planet the Terrians are mounting for war and reveal that they have high-end weapons after all, they were just kept secret. Next thing you know, both Mala and Stanton are loading up into their fighter ships and taking off for battle.

War is hell and a lot of computer animated characters die. In the midst of the battle the humans deposit the massive transformer on Terra's ground and begin to change the atmosphere of the planet. In a brave and completely out of left field move Stanton decides that genocide is wrong and drives his plane into the transformer Independence Day style, thus stopping the whole transformation process and saving the lives of Terrians everywhere. After Stanton's sacrifice it fast forwards to the future and you see that somehow humans and Terrians forgave each other and now humans live in their own little bio-dome on Terra with a giant statue of Stanton in the middle of their habitat.

The homes are beautiful, the flying whales are lovely, the characters are adorable, even the oddly shaped humans are likable but when the characters are thrust into all-out war it darkens the movie so much it's hard to believe the Terrians are willing to accept the humans living amongst them in the end. But it's a beautiful journey along the way. [Terra]