[Make Believe Seattle 2023] ALIENS ABDUCTED MY PARENTS AND NOW I FEEL KINDA LEFT OUT -- Cringey Coming-of-Age Dramedy Suffers a Weak Script

Review by Cole Groth

The quirkiness of Aliens Abducted My Parents and Now I Feel Kinda Left Out’s title sums up the movie pretty well. This coming-of-age film, directed by Jake Van Wagoner and based on a script from Austin Everett, details the lives of two diametrically opposed teenagers who go on a journey of self-discovery while trying to find out if aliens stole one of their parents. While the premise is promising and — if handled by a better crew — could’ve been a truly amazing experience, this coming-of-age dramedy struggles with a bad script and weak characters.

Aliens Abducted My Parents has a fairly basic premise. Itsy (Emma Tremblay) is your everyday teenage girl. She’s just moved into a new town with her overbearing little brother (Kenneth Cummins) and her loving parents (Matt Biedel and Hailey Smith). She meets space-obsessed Calvin (Jacob Buster), who’s dedicated to finding out what happened to his parents (Will Forte and Elizabeth Mitchell) after an alien force seemingly stole them from him years earlier. While she finds him to be nerdy at first, she bonds with him over time.

High-school characters are almost always undermined by their scripts, and this time, viewers will find themselves incredibly frustrated with the relationship between the two. Calvin is very annoying because of how ridiculously nerdy he is. His dialogue is so obnoxiously nerdy that you can’t help but roll his eyes whenever he opens his mouth. While his dialogue is bad, it’s not as bad as his bully’s (Landry Townsend), who is so incredibly mean that it doesn’t feel realistic. Instead of putting any nuance into the script, Everett’s script makes every character’s intentions too apparent. It’s so amateur that the audience will certainly question how this got turned into a script at all.

It’s a shame that the actors don’t do a good job of elevating the weak source material. Like the dialogue, every actor turns into a caricature of a natural person. While this film has a sci-fi twist, it should be believable as a film grounded in reality. Unfortunately, audiences will be unable to connect to any of the characters, which is a big problem for coming-of-age stories like this. Families will enjoy a few cute moments, mainly the bonding between Itsy and her brother or the relationship between Itsy and Calvin. However, beyond that, it’s still a cringe-worthy experience.

Indie coming-of-age movies shouldn’t be this embarrassing. That nobody questioned the unbearable nature of the script is a shock to me. Emma Tremblay is only a few days younger than me, which made me wonder if she ever spoke up about how unrealistic the script was while she was making this. There has to be a better way for dialogue to be written because even if this was a well-intentioned story, it’s frustrating to watch teenagers speak like they are the aforementioned aliens.

If you’re a big fan of coming-of-age movies, be prepared to be disappointed by Aliens Abducted My Parents and Now I Feel Kinda Left Out. It has an overall nice message and shines in a few moments through its quirkiness, but is by far and large an unrewarding experience. You’d be much better off watching The Edge of Seventeen, 10 Things I Hate About You, or any other coming-of-age dramedy because this is only a shell of many superior films.

Aliens Abducted My Parents and Now I Feel Kinda Left Out screened at the 2023 Make Believe Film Festival, which runs March 23-26 in Seattle, WA.

Rating: 1.5/5