Xeno

Rated PG-13 • Theaters

The new film Xeno overhauls the E.T. story for the 2020s, but it doesn’t have Spielberg’s magical touch that makes you care about the unlikely intergalactic friendship.

Renee (Lulu Wilson) is a socially awkward teen who discovers alien spacecraft wreckage in the New Mexico desert not far from the remote ranch where she lives with her emotionally fragile mother (Wrenn Schmidt) and her mom’s abusive drunk of a boyfriend (Paul Schneider). The traveler that crawls out of the pod doesn’t have the kind of face that winds up on schoolchildren’s lunchboxes: It’s a hulking lizard-arachnid twice Renee’s size, with an oblong head and toothy projections that make it a kissing cousin of the creature from the Alien franchise. Renee must not have seen those films because she shows little fear of the thing. Or, perhaps, the 15-year-old’s immediate and unreserved friendliness makes the statement that Americans should be welcoming to all manner of foreign visitors—to the southwest, no less. Renee names her new friend Croak and hides it in her cellar.

Despite the film’s earnestness, the alien-adolescent amity doesn’t resonate with the audience (with this member of it, anyway) primarily because the dialogue between Renee and Croak is one-sided. Renee does all the talking when she’s with her beastly BFF. And Croak: What’s it/he like? Does Croak want to phone home, or is he escaping a dysfunctional family, too? Croak merely grunts, apparently understanding English, and usually obeys Renee’s pleas not to disembowel people. At least Croak doesn’t cuss (I assume), something Renee and other characters do 30 or so times.

Government helicopters continually hover over the crash site, but heavily armed ground agents sweeping the area improbably don’t go after the alien even though they surely know where it is. A possible reason for this emerges about 70 minutes into the film, which is when the story finally gets interesting. But about 10 minutes later the end credits come crashing down as suddenly as Croak’s spaceship did, delivering a finale as unsatisfying as it is abrupt.