TV MOVIE REVIEW: “Ben 10: Alien Swarm” (2009)

About three years back, the original “Ben 10” series was drawing to a close, and Cartoon Network decided on the rather odd choice of doing a live-action TV Movie, just to see if there was any interest in that sort of thing. Curiouser still, CN maintained that the movie was actually ‘canon’ - that is, that it was actually part of the continuity of the long-running series that had just ended. This was probably more about publicity than anything else - it didn’t fit terribly snugly, to put it politely - but there have been subsequent half-hearted attempts in the current Cartoon Spinoff (“Ben 10: Alien Force”) to smooth over some of the wonkier bits from the movie. Of course these aren’t entirely effective, and at some point during its run, they decided to simply stop trying and just ignore the stuff that didn’t make sense.

It was a fairly ‘meh’ movie, clearly little more than a test balloon to see if there was a market for this kind of thing, but now that “Alien Force” is, itself, drawing to a close, they decided to give it another go. The new movie, “Alien Swarm,” is, itself, kind of ‘meh’, but then we knew that going in, right?

PLAY BY PLAY

Kevin drives in to a warehouse to buy some illegal alien technology from some motorcycle-riding pushers. The deal quickly goes south as more and more people keep turning up - first the middleman posing as a seller, then Kevin, then the real sellers, then Gwen and Ben, then the *real* person who hired the sellers, and then some crazy bald guy who tries to kill them all with a cloud of CGI bugs which were - of course - the alien tech that was up for sale to begin with.

It’s a hopelessly overwrought scene that looses focus almost immediately, with a lot of expositional info-dumping taking place to set up what’s going on, and more-or-less useless explanations of who the characters are, what The Plumbers are, who’s this long-lost-best-friend that everyone knows , but we’ve never heard of previously, and so on. It goes on for a long time, and really the one bit of information they don’t focus on is the actual point of the scene: what this alien tech is, how it came to be fore sale, and what it does. They also don’t lay out their opinions of the founding father’s reasons for setting up a government that is effectively a Roman-styled triumverate writ large, but the way they were yammering on there for a while, it wouldn’t have surprised me if they did. Anyway, they talk and they talk and they talk some more, and then they talk about talking, and then, just when you think they’re done with both the talking and the talking about talking - bang - they talk some more. Then the bad guy shows up, activates the chips, and tries to kill them all, which, mercifully, causes the story to move forward.

A fight ensues, with Ben turning in to a mediocre CGI representation of Big Chill who easily cleans up the situation, but the long-lost-best-friend-that-everyone-blah-blah-blah (“Elena” to her friends) is gone, as is the bald whackamole who tried to kill ‘em all.

From that point on, things improve considerably. They go to the