Allen is a stream, not a skip outright, but it is a skip for most adults, and the reason is not the puppet. It is the script, which announces every feeling the film is trying to produce before the audience has a chance to produce one on its own. Luke Buckmaster’s review for The Guardian lands the whole problem in one phrase: “a relentlessly unsubtle, if pleasantly toned experience.”
The one choice worth taking seriously is the alien himself, and it is a real one. Allen stands 69 centimetres tall, built by the Brisbane creature house Formation Effects as a family of roughly eight purpose-specific puppets, worked bunraku style by Sarah McLeod, Gemma Keliher and Anna Straker with as many as ten operators on him at once, according to What’s on Netflix’s making-of. A fully animatronic version was built first and scrapped after a large test with Netflix did not work. Daley Pearson then made the harder, better call: stop hiding the character in shadow and shoot him in daylight, in living rooms, the way he put it, “he had to be the T-Rex in broad daylight eating the Gallimimus.” That is the difference between an effect you tolerate and a creature you believe, and T.J. Power, who plays the adult Petey across the table from him, said as much himself: “It was like another actor, another performer in the room.”
Buckmaster is not wrong to push back on what the puppet adds up to, though. He calls Allen “an archetypal cute alien pal: an amalgamation of characteristics rather than an individual with distinctive quirks,” and the design bears that out (a default smile borrowed from a gecko, translucent skin from a green tree frog, warmth around the face from a baby hippopotamus, which is a generous number of animals to assemble into one personality). The puppet is a craft triumph and a character shortfall at the same time. Both things are true, and the film never quite resolves which one matters more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8G5Y25W3eA
Where Allen loses its nerve entirely is in everything built around that puppet. The local police chief, Rory, is the kind of villain Buckmaster says feels “airlifted in from central casting to play bad guy,” present to generate stakes rather than to embody them. The goodbye lands worse. The film tells the audience it is coming, three times in a row, opening with “Sometimes even best friends have to say goodbye,” so that by the time the actual scene arrives, the work of feeling it has already been done for the viewer twice over.
That caution is strange coming from Pearson, who has not built a career on being careful. He co-founded Ludo Studio, the company behind Bluey, co-wrote an early draft of Talk to Me, and co-wrote Thou Shalt Not Steal with Sophie Miller, his co-writer here. Allen began life at Netflix as an eight-episode series before landing on what Pearson calls “very polite pause,” which meant the screenplay had to be rebuilt from scratch rather than cut down from footage already in hand. Pearson’s older brother Liam died of cancer at 26 when Pearson was 13, and he told The Guardian the film is about “the perfume of Liam” rather than a literal account of him. That context explains the ache under the gloss. It does not excuse the gloss.
Bluey households with kids under eight or nine will get exactly what the trailer sold: a friendly, 105-minute creature feature with a hero who, in Pearson’s own description, is closer to “a goldfish with great powers” than to anything that needs to haunt a child afterward. Anyone who still has E.T. more or less memorized will spend that runtime making comparisons the new film cannot win, especially once the Queensland coastline shows up looking, as Buckmaster puts it, “glossy, almost synthetic.” Parents scrolling for the right mood on a Friday night have better options already sorted in the best movies on Netflix right now than a two-hour commitment to a film this eager to be liked.
For the Amblin homage done with some actual bite, there is David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street, which Buckmaster points to directly. It is a leaner film at 99 minutes, opened to $21 million domestically against a B CinemaScore, which tells you it was never exactly beloved on arrival either. What it has that Allen doesn’t is teeth. IndieWire’s David Ehrlich called it a “crowd-pleasing but winkingly mean-spirited Amblin homage” that “will traumatize 10-year-olds for life and make their parents feel like they’re kids again.” Allen would never risk the trauma. That caution is its ceiling.
The verdict holds with one qualification. Ludo Studio proved it can build something real with its hands, and the puppet is worth the price of admission on its own. The film wrapped around him just needs to trust the audience the way it trusted the craftsmen.
