![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akinoameNow, before I get started, I’d like to make one thing perfectly clear: I have seen the pop-up trivia edition of Race Against Time. However, I believe in one basic tenet: If the only way your show makes any lick of sense is with supplemental trivia that may not be accessible to the audience, then that’s bad storytelling (also comes up with “Ken 10” and Digimon Adventure 02 and Digimon Tamers regarding Ken and Ryo’s backstories). As such, I will not be taking that into account, simply because they’re serving to explain what should have been explained in the story itself.
On a dark night in Bellwood—“the most normal town in the USA (population 26,000 and growing!)” boasts its welcome sign; come Alien Force, I call that false advertising—a mysterious figure all in black starts…well, stopping the local clock tower and blowing up a lot of glass. Heatblast arrives to fight him. As the Sheriff’s department arrives, a bunch of…cloaked time ninja guys that I’m pretty sure I saw in Power Rangers once jump out and start attacking. Heatblast keeps them from hurting the police, then easily destroys the baddie before the Omnitrix times out and he has to make himself scarce. Ben runs into Gwen and Grandpa Max, who scold him for not waiting before taking on the threat.
Summer is over, and it’s back to school for Ben and Gwen, and Ben is failing to fit in now that he’s back home. His grades are low, he’s being bullied, he’s failing at sports, and he’s generally not feeling like the hero he’d been. And he’s not getting any help at home because in the wise words of a certain Fresh Prince, “parents just don’t understand.” Apparently while Ben was away, his parents went full-blown hippie on him, insisting on giving him adult-like freedoms (which apparently include not freaking the hell out when he comes home very late from school without having called at all, when he’s only ten years old), and in their quest to treat him like an equal, they alienate him by having him call them by their given names and really fail to offer any care or sympathy. Ben is ready to bolt, but Max tells him that he’s got to try to live a normal life now (while really not explaining why Ben can’t just reveal his identity). Still, the more Ben tries, the worse it gets for him.
However, while going over some photos she’d taken for the yearbook, Gwen and Ben notice a strange blur in the background. Gwen proves she’s apparently Archie from CSI and manages to use UNIX or something to enhance the image to near-perfection, revealing that Ben’s being stalked by the very alien he thought he’d killed. When they show Grandpa Max, he reveals that the alien is Eon of Chronia, a legend among the Plumbers, who had come to Earth two centuries ago with a device called the Hands of Armageddon that would open a rift into another dimension (explained later as “in time” and in the behind-the-scenes as “another galaxy,” so your guess is as good as mine). When they head to a secret Plumbers’ base where Eon had been held, they find the whole place trashed, Eon missing, and his warden aged into a really bad puppet (seriously, it’s so bad that the scene makes the skeleton from Lost Galaxy’s Facing the Past look good). You know what that means.
Ah! After two-hundred years, he’s free. It’s time to conquer Earth!
That is what he wants, right?
Right?
…I can’t make sense of this script.
The Tennysons head to the Hardware Store, a top-secret Plumber base hidden…underneath the local hardware store. But as they enter, a time ninja…guy is spying on them. See, this is the problem with hiding in plain sight—it’s in plain sight! After seeing the movie’s variation on the Plumbers’ insignia (which oddly resembles the Freemasons’ insignia), they enter the lab to meet the last of the Plumbers: just about every person over fifty living in Bellwood. Or at least, that’s how it seems, given you’ve got the Fire Chief, the mailman, the lady who runs the local diner, and their principal. Well, they’ve got a Doctor, but not the one I was looking for. And that still doesn’t cover the retired folks! The Plumbers show them to the Hands of Armageddon (which is basically a DHD on steroids) and reveal how impossible it’s been to destroy. Each attempt has caused a disaster, rumored to have been the reason behind the Grand Canyon and confirmed to be the cause behind the Great Chicago Fire and the Great Quake of ‘89, which basically puts Bellwood in the tri-state area of Arizona, Illinois, and California, none of which borders another. But midway through the discussion, Eon and his Time Ninjas From Outer Space attack. While the Plumbers fight (and the token black guy dies first with a Wilhelm scream—three tropes at once!), Ben realizes the Omnitrix isn’t working. Eon kidnaps him, but Ben manages to get free, finding that he’s conveniently left his bike nearby so he can escape. But Eon has the ability to possess cars, and he chases after him in a big black Chevy and a massive delivery van, cornering him in a small, dark alley. He says that what’s about to happen to Ben is inevitable, but before anything can get too skeevy, an old Asian man shoots him faster than you can say “One more thing.” Ben makes it home, his parents are more afraid they’ve offended him than the fact that they haven’t heard from him since he left for school, and Max pulls that Batman thing that scares the pants off of people. Ben explains to Max that for some reason, Eon made the watch act funny and start burning him, and Max explains that the Plumbers think Eon needs the Omnitrix to activate the Hands. He apologizes for dragging Ben and Gwen into all of this, as it’s a life that he wanted to protect Ben’s dad and grandmother from (admittedly, they’re wrong about Grandma dying, but it was a good guess), and he swears to protect Ben. He’d prefer to get Ben out of town, but Ben insists on staying to fight, so they compromise on having Ben put under guard twenty-four hours a day.
The next day at school, Ben is jumpy as can be, made worse when Gwen decides to sneak up on him and scare him. Sweetie, if your cousin is being stalked by some Time Lord pedophile with a leather fetish and a fishbowl on his head and is justifiably scared to death and looking over his shoulder at any movement...I don't think it's a good idea to sneak up behind him and yell, “Boo!” Ben points out all the guards watching him, and when Gwen insists on practicing their magic act for the school talent show, he insists there’s no point because if Eon gets the Omnitrix, it’s over. He storms off to try to think.
Naturally, this whole “let’s put a guard on Ben all day” plan backfires. Eon attacks Ben at school, and his babysitters are utterly useless, leaving it to Ben to sound the fire alarm and defend himself as Diamondhead. After hiding out in the girls’ bathroom long enough for the watch to time out, Ben decides to settle things with Eon for the last time. He and Gwen hold a stakeout in the park, but Grandpa arrives and tells Ben what a stupid plan it was. Before anyone can do a thing, the Rustbucket blows up, Time Ninjas seize the family, and Eon walks over, grinning like a Sephiroth who’s just burned Nibelheim to the ground. When Ben wakes up, he’s chained up in front of the Hands of Armageddon, with Gwen and Max across from him—as Eon says, “to watch.”
…You know, with the chains, and the whole grabbing Ben and luring him into sketchy places alone in the dark… No, you know what? I’ll get to that later.
Eon explains to Ben that the Omnitrix’s ten-minute time limit was created to prevent the aliens’ personalities from overwhelming him, especially one alien. There’s a secret that Max has been keeping from him the entire time. And before you can throw in the prerequisite, “I am your father,” Eon drops a bigger bombshell: He’s Ben, possessed by an alien within the Omnitrix the entire time. I think, at least. I lost track of the plot again at this point, but I’m pretty sure he’s Dark Danny Phantom. Which makes his previous moments all the more skeevy. While Ben begs him to stop (seriously, I’m trying to avoid the connotations!), Eon brings up his own form on the Omnitrix, forcing Ben to transform into a younger version of him without the helmet. As Eon II looks kind of like he’s going to be sick (I’m assuming the look on his face was supposed to convey Ben’s personality fighting and losing against the Eon persona, like we’d later see with Ben and Ra’ad in Ultimate Alien’s “Fused,” but it comes off like he’s going to throw up), Eon I says that only one version can exist at a single point of time, and disappears through a…time portal…thing.
Neo Eon doesn’t appear to have any Ben left in him, and he swiftly activates the Hands of Armageddon. By some pretty improbable feat of gymnastics or something, Gwen is able to get a laser wrench (what, no sonic screwdriver?) from Max’s pocket out and open, blasting his chains free so he can do the same for her. He tells her to find the other Plumbers while he tries to stop Neo Eon and the Hands. Which means electrocuting Neo Eon with a power coupling, then sticking two to the Hands to try to…short them out or something. The Plumbers, meanwhile, are all locked in a room, but it’s Principal White to the rescue! Except that throughout the entire movie, he’s failed to find his keys. Rather than put up with the running gag one more time, the others tell him to press the Easy Button, freeing them in a snap. Mr. White then proves he’s got some level of competence and produces a wheelbarrow full of blasters. While they’re arming up, Gwen realizes that Eon is waking up. She takes a massive wrench and hits him with it, attempting to keep him from attacking Max, I suppose. Unfortunately, she failed to realize that her cousin is big and scary in this form, and he’s also incredibly dangerous. She starts backing up in fear, attempting to reason with the Ben she hopes is still inside. She fails, but before Eon can strangle her, the Plumbers show up. And then the Time Ninjas show up and disarm them just as quickly. Gwen’s only hope is to talk quickly, and she confesses (after a series of faults that I’d think would make Ben say, “Screw it” and let Eon keep control) that she does love Ben and she thinks he’s a hero. Ben and Eon start fighting for control again (because he sounds like he’s being strangled and he’s thrashing around), and when one finally wins, he produces a globe of energy at Gwen…and throws it at the Time Ninjas, destroying them. Ben’s defeated Eon’s possession, and he manages a rather tricky transformation back to normal, asking if Max stopped the Hands. But before Gwen can tell him the bad news, Ben runs off and finds Max somehow held in place by the Hands. Max attempts to tell Ben goodbye, but Ben’s having none of that. He insists he still has more to learn, grabs his grandfather, and yells for everyone to come and help him. They manage to pull Max free, and unplugged, the Hands deactivate. Gwen realizes they’re running late for the talent show, and Mr. White offers to take them, but the battle’s not over yet. Eon the original makes one last appearance, throwing Ben through the air and raging at him for giving up godhood. Ben goes Wildmutt, but Eon’s content to just shoot at him until the Omnitrix times out, so he can take over again. Thinking fast, Wildmutt takes a time-frozen Gwen and uses her to smack Eon into the Hands of Armageddon, somehow destroying them, and without wiping out any major landmarks to boot. A small power outage is all they have to worry about.
They rush to the talent show, and Gwen has two seconds to make a magic act out of Wildmutt’s transformation back into Ben. The audience goes crazy with applause, and Cash and JT slip out, realizing that Ben really did know Wildmutt and might just let him know about the things Cash was insinuating about them. But when it comes time to announce the winner, naturally the ten-year-olds baring their midriffs and shaking their hips won first place, and Ben and Gwen got the world’s smallest pity trophy for second place. Ben’s parents come to congratulate them—Gwen’s parents are oddly absent the entire movie, even in reference—and Max takes the kids out for pizza. Ben decides that maybe it will be nice to try living a normal life for a change, and an alien ship flies overhead. But we don’t need to worry about that because Alien Swarm didn’t involve it and was better-handled anyway.
The movie’s villain is Eon, a Chronian with the power to control time at its base elements, who appeared and was captured two hundred years ago, yet still managed to keep appearing over and over in the timeline, searching for Ben. There are a lot of discrepancies about him, but in short, he’s a Time Lord pedophile with a leather fetish, wearing a fishbowl on his head. I wish I could say I was kidding about that, but honestly, he really comes off as the Amber Alert That Came From Outer Space. He has this horrible habit of luring Ben into secluded areas, pinning his arms to his sides, and saying some things that could really be taken another way. Especially his lines about Ben becoming a god, when he’s chained up in the base. He runs his finger down Ben’s arm in a way that just screams, “Bad touch!” and just sounding far sketchier than he needed to. I mean, especially when he’s got Ben chained and says that his family is around to watch…
The movie seems a little torn about just who he is, however. The first half of the movie implies that he’s a generic alien threat, a warlord from Chronia who’s trying to save his race by letting them raze the Earth and take over. He even clearly says that to accomplish his goal, he needs Ben dead. Then the scene in the base happens, and he says that he’s actually Ben, possibly from an alternate future where he was overtaken by the Chronian DNA already in the Omnitrix. Who for some reason associates with the culture of the Chronians and wants to free them and needs to go back and ensure that his ten-year-old self is overtaken, without ever explaining that. I don’t know, “wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey”! In any case, the guy is like a melodramatic Darth Vader (who was the actor’s inspiration for the character) and is actually really cool, except for the fact that he makes no sense at all.
In this movie, the Plumbers first made contact with Eon two-hundred years ago, capturing him and seizing the Hands of Armageddon. Every so often, they get together and try to destroy the thing, kind of like an alien weapons disposal family reunion. But the Plumbers in Bellwood have secretly been the guardians of Eon for all this time. They also somehow knew that he somehow knew about Ben and the Omnitrix (thus implying that Eon always was Ben) and have been trying to protect Ben. The two Plumbers we really see the most are Doris Dalton and Ed White. Doris is either the owner or a waitress at the local diner and has always been kind to Ben, and she’s definitely the enforcer among the Bellwood Plumbers. Ed is the principal at Ben’s school and somehow has missed the years of bullying Ben has gone through. Worse, he explains to Ben that he did know Cash was picking on him, but gave Ben the detention instead because he didn’t want to blow his cover.
I’m sorry. That’s not blowing your cover, that’s doing your fucking job. You’re the principal of the school. You have an obligation to protect the welfare of your students, no matter who they are. If one of your students is being bullied and you know it, then your job is to intervene. By that admission, you have done far more harm to Ben than Eon ever could.
This movie is pretty bad, albeit enjoyable. The acting is really pretty sad. While the secondary characters do a pretty good job—Aloma Wright and Robert Picardo play their parts very well, as do Don McManus and Beth Littleford with the sheer insanity on their plates—the main cast is not as strong. Ben is the strongest of the trio, played by Graham Phillips, who combines traits that the other two lack: he’s good and he wants to be there. Lee Majors is a good actor, but it’s pretty clear he doesn’t want to be there, and his Grandpa Max is extremely flat. I find it hard to buy the emotional moments from him, simply because he doesn’t put forth much effort into it. For a guy whose grandson is being stalked by an evil alternate universe version of himself that wants his body for some under-explained reason, he doesn’t seem all that worried. And Haley Ramm is terrible as Gwen. None of the actors have any chemistry with one another, and in this case, it really kills her performance. Where in Alien Swarm, the actors for Ben, Gwen, and Kevin could all play off each other well and carry the banter moments, you don’t get that at all from Haley Ramm and Graham Phillips. Ramm fails with her affect considerably—her tone of voice barely changes, whether offering a sarcastic comment to Ben or pleading with Eon to remember his true identity. That scene is especially painful, with her fear sounding forced and her “Oh my god, it’s working!” so poorly delivered that it’s laughable. And when you don’t know whether or not her attempts to reach Ben are working or not, it’s painful. Christien Anholt’s Eon, at least, is hammy and enjoyable. Hammy villains can be fun—look at Power Rangers and Doctor Who. But I’ve said that the best parts of the movie were Cash and JT, and it’s true to some extent. They’re fun to watch in the same way that Bulk and Skull were in the early seasons of Power Rangers. They were mean, they were cheesy, but you knew you had to watch them get theirs in the end.
Special effects and CGI were also poor, and given that Alien Swarm did a lot better only a year later, that’s really sad to say. The aged Constantine Jacobs, the Plumber who’d been guarding Eon, was a very obvious puppet, and his mouth movements didn’t match the dialogue half the time. Wirework stood out like a sore thumb when Eon threw Ben across the room—you may not see the wires, but the stunt choreography there is so bad that you might as well have. And the CGI aliens did not work. While Eon’s powers looked fine, given he mostly dealt with easy-to-manip lightning bolts and bubbles, the other aliens progressively looked faker. Heatblast looked fine, if only because it’s apparently easier to make a guy who’s on fire look like he’s really there, even making sure to get the heat distortion in the air right. Diamondhead didn’t translate well at all, and Grey Matter was even worse, particularly because they decided to show his transformation, which looked terrible done in live-action and CGI. Wildmutt didn’t look much better, possibly because his design is more cartoonish than some of the other aliens—a reason why I think Scooby-Doo never translates that well to CGI. But even in Stargate SG-1, a monster like Wildmutt looked a lot more impressive. To make matters worse, CGI Wildmutt picks up a CGI frozen-Gwen, who looks even more plastic than Wildmutt.
But alongside the acting, the greatest failing of this movie is the writing. The story is something that really could have been good: Ben struggles to readjust to normal life while an evil alternate future version of himself is trying to destroy the world. That’s the stuff of dreams. Unfortunately, it all falls apart quickly. Ben’s troubles at school and at home are touched upon without going into a whole lot of depth or resolution. Contrast Alien Swarm, where the sideplot of Ben’s feelings for Elena and her sense of betrayal was integral, with the constant question of if Ben really was blinded by his old love for her that he couldn’t think reasonably. His parents, while enjoyably spacey in Alien Force and Ultimate Alien, are so out-there that you wonder if Sandra’s found more than just wild sage growing in their backyard. And the adults Ben needs to depend on for this battle come off as so incompetent that it’s a wonder he made it this far into the schoolyear at all! By the time Grey Matter starts the food fight in the diner, you wonder if you’re not watching Ben’s progressive spiral downward as the bullying and the lack of sympathy from any relatives or adults brings him to a breaking point. Hell, with all that, it’d be no wonder he’d snap, disavow his own identity, and become a supervillain. Worked for Danny Phantom.
A major thing that drags this down is overuse of running gags. Ben 10 is a lighthearted cartoon that features some running gags. They’re used to death here. Yes, we get it, Grandpa Max eats weird stuff. It doesn’t mean that every time he’s on-screen, you need to show him eating something off of Bizarre Foods or No Reservations. And there’s only so much of Ed’s inability to find the right key for anything before you snap like Doris did and take a hammer to a lockbox. Only, the audience member might not warn Ed to get out of the way before swinging. Also, the movie tries too hard at times to reach out to a new audience. They try to explain concepts like the Plumbers, and it’s so heavy-handed it’s facepalm-worthy. Ben’s only dealt with Plumber business his entire summer. How does he suddenly not know what they are?
And finally, because I can’t stress it enough, the Eon plot made no sense. Was he a separate alien, or was he Ben? Did he want to kill Ben, or did he want to possess Ben? I’ve watched this movie at least six times now, and I’ve slowly moved more toward the “Eon is Ben” theory, but it still doesn’t account for everything that happens in the story. I feel like the script went through major rewrites, with one version being that a new alien attacked Ben and another version being that an evil alternate future Ben attacked, and then the network shot it down. I figure if this is the case, the original idea was “Evil Future Ben” and it got shot down because they already had the “Ben 10,000” episode to deal with a future Ben who wasn’t exactly ideal. Either way, the plot contradicts itself and is hard to make sense of, which is really bad when dealing with your big bad.
Race Against Time was written by Mitch Watson, with story by Thomas Pugsley and Greg Kline, directed by Alex Winter. Graham Phillips played Ben, Haley Ramm played Gwen, and Lee Majors played Max. Christien Anholt played Eon. David Franklin played Heatblast, Carlos Alazraqui as Grey Matter, Daran Norris as Diamondhead, and Dee Bradley Baker reprised his role of Wildmutt. Aloma Wright and Robert Picardo played Doris Dalton and Ed White. Don McManus and Beth Littleford played Ben’s parents, Carl and Sandra.
On a dark night in Bellwood—“the most normal town in the USA (population 26,000 and growing!)” boasts its welcome sign; come Alien Force, I call that false advertising—a mysterious figure all in black starts…well, stopping the local clock tower and blowing up a lot of glass. Heatblast arrives to fight him. As the Sheriff’s department arrives, a bunch of…cloaked time ninja guys that I’m pretty sure I saw in Power Rangers once jump out and start attacking. Heatblast keeps them from hurting the police, then easily destroys the baddie before the Omnitrix times out and he has to make himself scarce. Ben runs into Gwen and Grandpa Max, who scold him for not waiting before taking on the threat.
Summer is over, and it’s back to school for Ben and Gwen, and Ben is failing to fit in now that he’s back home. His grades are low, he’s being bullied, he’s failing at sports, and he’s generally not feeling like the hero he’d been. And he’s not getting any help at home because in the wise words of a certain Fresh Prince, “parents just don’t understand.” Apparently while Ben was away, his parents went full-blown hippie on him, insisting on giving him adult-like freedoms (which apparently include not freaking the hell out when he comes home very late from school without having called at all, when he’s only ten years old), and in their quest to treat him like an equal, they alienate him by having him call them by their given names and really fail to offer any care or sympathy. Ben is ready to bolt, but Max tells him that he’s got to try to live a normal life now (while really not explaining why Ben can’t just reveal his identity). Still, the more Ben tries, the worse it gets for him.
However, while going over some photos she’d taken for the yearbook, Gwen and Ben notice a strange blur in the background. Gwen proves she’s apparently Archie from CSI and manages to use UNIX or something to enhance the image to near-perfection, revealing that Ben’s being stalked by the very alien he thought he’d killed. When they show Grandpa Max, he reveals that the alien is Eon of Chronia, a legend among the Plumbers, who had come to Earth two centuries ago with a device called the Hands of Armageddon that would open a rift into another dimension (explained later as “in time” and in the behind-the-scenes as “another galaxy,” so your guess is as good as mine). When they head to a secret Plumbers’ base where Eon had been held, they find the whole place trashed, Eon missing, and his warden aged into a really bad puppet (seriously, it’s so bad that the scene makes the skeleton from Lost Galaxy’s Facing the Past look good). You know what that means.
Ah! After two-hundred years, he’s free. It’s time to conquer Earth!
That is what he wants, right?
Right?
…I can’t make sense of this script.
The Tennysons head to the Hardware Store, a top-secret Plumber base hidden…underneath the local hardware store. But as they enter, a time ninja…guy is spying on them. See, this is the problem with hiding in plain sight—it’s in plain sight! After seeing the movie’s variation on the Plumbers’ insignia (which oddly resembles the Freemasons’ insignia), they enter the lab to meet the last of the Plumbers: just about every person over fifty living in Bellwood. Or at least, that’s how it seems, given you’ve got the Fire Chief, the mailman, the lady who runs the local diner, and their principal. Well, they’ve got a Doctor, but not the one I was looking for. And that still doesn’t cover the retired folks! The Plumbers show them to the Hands of Armageddon (which is basically a DHD on steroids) and reveal how impossible it’s been to destroy. Each attempt has caused a disaster, rumored to have been the reason behind the Grand Canyon and confirmed to be the cause behind the Great Chicago Fire and the Great Quake of ‘89, which basically puts Bellwood in the tri-state area of Arizona, Illinois, and California, none of which borders another. But midway through the discussion, Eon and his Time Ninjas From Outer Space attack. While the Plumbers fight (and the token black guy dies first with a Wilhelm scream—three tropes at once!), Ben realizes the Omnitrix isn’t working. Eon kidnaps him, but Ben manages to get free, finding that he’s conveniently left his bike nearby so he can escape. But Eon has the ability to possess cars, and he chases after him in a big black Chevy and a massive delivery van, cornering him in a small, dark alley. He says that what’s about to happen to Ben is inevitable, but before anything can get too skeevy, an old Asian man shoots him faster than you can say “One more thing.” Ben makes it home, his parents are more afraid they’ve offended him than the fact that they haven’t heard from him since he left for school, and Max pulls that Batman thing that scares the pants off of people. Ben explains to Max that for some reason, Eon made the watch act funny and start burning him, and Max explains that the Plumbers think Eon needs the Omnitrix to activate the Hands. He apologizes for dragging Ben and Gwen into all of this, as it’s a life that he wanted to protect Ben’s dad and grandmother from (admittedly, they’re wrong about Grandma dying, but it was a good guess), and he swears to protect Ben. He’d prefer to get Ben out of town, but Ben insists on staying to fight, so they compromise on having Ben put under guard twenty-four hours a day.
The next day at school, Ben is jumpy as can be, made worse when Gwen decides to sneak up on him and scare him. Sweetie, if your cousin is being stalked by some Time Lord pedophile with a leather fetish and a fishbowl on his head and is justifiably scared to death and looking over his shoulder at any movement...I don't think it's a good idea to sneak up behind him and yell, “Boo!” Ben points out all the guards watching him, and when Gwen insists on practicing their magic act for the school talent show, he insists there’s no point because if Eon gets the Omnitrix, it’s over. He storms off to try to think.
Naturally, this whole “let’s put a guard on Ben all day” plan backfires. Eon attacks Ben at school, and his babysitters are utterly useless, leaving it to Ben to sound the fire alarm and defend himself as Diamondhead. After hiding out in the girls’ bathroom long enough for the watch to time out, Ben decides to settle things with Eon for the last time. He and Gwen hold a stakeout in the park, but Grandpa arrives and tells Ben what a stupid plan it was. Before anyone can do a thing, the Rustbucket blows up, Time Ninjas seize the family, and Eon walks over, grinning like a Sephiroth who’s just burned Nibelheim to the ground. When Ben wakes up, he’s chained up in front of the Hands of Armageddon, with Gwen and Max across from him—as Eon says, “to watch.”
…You know, with the chains, and the whole grabbing Ben and luring him into sketchy places alone in the dark… No, you know what? I’ll get to that later.
Eon explains to Ben that the Omnitrix’s ten-minute time limit was created to prevent the aliens’ personalities from overwhelming him, especially one alien. There’s a secret that Max has been keeping from him the entire time. And before you can throw in the prerequisite, “I am your father,” Eon drops a bigger bombshell: He’s Ben, possessed by an alien within the Omnitrix the entire time. I think, at least. I lost track of the plot again at this point, but I’m pretty sure he’s Dark Danny Phantom. Which makes his previous moments all the more skeevy. While Ben begs him to stop (seriously, I’m trying to avoid the connotations!), Eon brings up his own form on the Omnitrix, forcing Ben to transform into a younger version of him without the helmet. As Eon II looks kind of like he’s going to be sick (I’m assuming the look on his face was supposed to convey Ben’s personality fighting and losing against the Eon persona, like we’d later see with Ben and Ra’ad in Ultimate Alien’s “Fused,” but it comes off like he’s going to throw up), Eon I says that only one version can exist at a single point of time, and disappears through a…time portal…thing.
Neo Eon doesn’t appear to have any Ben left in him, and he swiftly activates the Hands of Armageddon. By some pretty improbable feat of gymnastics or something, Gwen is able to get a laser wrench (what, no sonic screwdriver?) from Max’s pocket out and open, blasting his chains free so he can do the same for her. He tells her to find the other Plumbers while he tries to stop Neo Eon and the Hands. Which means electrocuting Neo Eon with a power coupling, then sticking two to the Hands to try to…short them out or something. The Plumbers, meanwhile, are all locked in a room, but it’s Principal White to the rescue! Except that throughout the entire movie, he’s failed to find his keys. Rather than put up with the running gag one more time, the others tell him to press the Easy Button, freeing them in a snap. Mr. White then proves he’s got some level of competence and produces a wheelbarrow full of blasters. While they’re arming up, Gwen realizes that Eon is waking up. She takes a massive wrench and hits him with it, attempting to keep him from attacking Max, I suppose. Unfortunately, she failed to realize that her cousin is big and scary in this form, and he’s also incredibly dangerous. She starts backing up in fear, attempting to reason with the Ben she hopes is still inside. She fails, but before Eon can strangle her, the Plumbers show up. And then the Time Ninjas show up and disarm them just as quickly. Gwen’s only hope is to talk quickly, and she confesses (after a series of faults that I’d think would make Ben say, “Screw it” and let Eon keep control) that she does love Ben and she thinks he’s a hero. Ben and Eon start fighting for control again (because he sounds like he’s being strangled and he’s thrashing around), and when one finally wins, he produces a globe of energy at Gwen…and throws it at the Time Ninjas, destroying them. Ben’s defeated Eon’s possession, and he manages a rather tricky transformation back to normal, asking if Max stopped the Hands. But before Gwen can tell him the bad news, Ben runs off and finds Max somehow held in place by the Hands. Max attempts to tell Ben goodbye, but Ben’s having none of that. He insists he still has more to learn, grabs his grandfather, and yells for everyone to come and help him. They manage to pull Max free, and unplugged, the Hands deactivate. Gwen realizes they’re running late for the talent show, and Mr. White offers to take them, but the battle’s not over yet. Eon the original makes one last appearance, throwing Ben through the air and raging at him for giving up godhood. Ben goes Wildmutt, but Eon’s content to just shoot at him until the Omnitrix times out, so he can take over again. Thinking fast, Wildmutt takes a time-frozen Gwen and uses her to smack Eon into the Hands of Armageddon, somehow destroying them, and without wiping out any major landmarks to boot. A small power outage is all they have to worry about.
They rush to the talent show, and Gwen has two seconds to make a magic act out of Wildmutt’s transformation back into Ben. The audience goes crazy with applause, and Cash and JT slip out, realizing that Ben really did know Wildmutt and might just let him know about the things Cash was insinuating about them. But when it comes time to announce the winner, naturally the ten-year-olds baring their midriffs and shaking their hips won first place, and Ben and Gwen got the world’s smallest pity trophy for second place. Ben’s parents come to congratulate them—Gwen’s parents are oddly absent the entire movie, even in reference—and Max takes the kids out for pizza. Ben decides that maybe it will be nice to try living a normal life for a change, and an alien ship flies overhead. But we don’t need to worry about that because Alien Swarm didn’t involve it and was better-handled anyway.
The movie’s villain is Eon, a Chronian with the power to control time at its base elements, who appeared and was captured two hundred years ago, yet still managed to keep appearing over and over in the timeline, searching for Ben. There are a lot of discrepancies about him, but in short, he’s a Time Lord pedophile with a leather fetish, wearing a fishbowl on his head. I wish I could say I was kidding about that, but honestly, he really comes off as the Amber Alert That Came From Outer Space. He has this horrible habit of luring Ben into secluded areas, pinning his arms to his sides, and saying some things that could really be taken another way. Especially his lines about Ben becoming a god, when he’s chained up in the base. He runs his finger down Ben’s arm in a way that just screams, “Bad touch!” and just sounding far sketchier than he needed to. I mean, especially when he’s got Ben chained and says that his family is around to watch…
The movie seems a little torn about just who he is, however. The first half of the movie implies that he’s a generic alien threat, a warlord from Chronia who’s trying to save his race by letting them raze the Earth and take over. He even clearly says that to accomplish his goal, he needs Ben dead. Then the scene in the base happens, and he says that he’s actually Ben, possibly from an alternate future where he was overtaken by the Chronian DNA already in the Omnitrix. Who for some reason associates with the culture of the Chronians and wants to free them and needs to go back and ensure that his ten-year-old self is overtaken, without ever explaining that. I don’t know, “wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey”! In any case, the guy is like a melodramatic Darth Vader (who was the actor’s inspiration for the character) and is actually really cool, except for the fact that he makes no sense at all.
In this movie, the Plumbers first made contact with Eon two-hundred years ago, capturing him and seizing the Hands of Armageddon. Every so often, they get together and try to destroy the thing, kind of like an alien weapons disposal family reunion. But the Plumbers in Bellwood have secretly been the guardians of Eon for all this time. They also somehow knew that he somehow knew about Ben and the Omnitrix (thus implying that Eon always was Ben) and have been trying to protect Ben. The two Plumbers we really see the most are Doris Dalton and Ed White. Doris is either the owner or a waitress at the local diner and has always been kind to Ben, and she’s definitely the enforcer among the Bellwood Plumbers. Ed is the principal at Ben’s school and somehow has missed the years of bullying Ben has gone through. Worse, he explains to Ben that he did know Cash was picking on him, but gave Ben the detention instead because he didn’t want to blow his cover.
I’m sorry. That’s not blowing your cover, that’s doing your fucking job. You’re the principal of the school. You have an obligation to protect the welfare of your students, no matter who they are. If one of your students is being bullied and you know it, then your job is to intervene. By that admission, you have done far more harm to Ben than Eon ever could.
This movie is pretty bad, albeit enjoyable. The acting is really pretty sad. While the secondary characters do a pretty good job—Aloma Wright and Robert Picardo play their parts very well, as do Don McManus and Beth Littleford with the sheer insanity on their plates—the main cast is not as strong. Ben is the strongest of the trio, played by Graham Phillips, who combines traits that the other two lack: he’s good and he wants to be there. Lee Majors is a good actor, but it’s pretty clear he doesn’t want to be there, and his Grandpa Max is extremely flat. I find it hard to buy the emotional moments from him, simply because he doesn’t put forth much effort into it. For a guy whose grandson is being stalked by an evil alternate universe version of himself that wants his body for some under-explained reason, he doesn’t seem all that worried. And Haley Ramm is terrible as Gwen. None of the actors have any chemistry with one another, and in this case, it really kills her performance. Where in Alien Swarm, the actors for Ben, Gwen, and Kevin could all play off each other well and carry the banter moments, you don’t get that at all from Haley Ramm and Graham Phillips. Ramm fails with her affect considerably—her tone of voice barely changes, whether offering a sarcastic comment to Ben or pleading with Eon to remember his true identity. That scene is especially painful, with her fear sounding forced and her “Oh my god, it’s working!” so poorly delivered that it’s laughable. And when you don’t know whether or not her attempts to reach Ben are working or not, it’s painful. Christien Anholt’s Eon, at least, is hammy and enjoyable. Hammy villains can be fun—look at Power Rangers and Doctor Who. But I’ve said that the best parts of the movie were Cash and JT, and it’s true to some extent. They’re fun to watch in the same way that Bulk and Skull were in the early seasons of Power Rangers. They were mean, they were cheesy, but you knew you had to watch them get theirs in the end.
Special effects and CGI were also poor, and given that Alien Swarm did a lot better only a year later, that’s really sad to say. The aged Constantine Jacobs, the Plumber who’d been guarding Eon, was a very obvious puppet, and his mouth movements didn’t match the dialogue half the time. Wirework stood out like a sore thumb when Eon threw Ben across the room—you may not see the wires, but the stunt choreography there is so bad that you might as well have. And the CGI aliens did not work. While Eon’s powers looked fine, given he mostly dealt with easy-to-manip lightning bolts and bubbles, the other aliens progressively looked faker. Heatblast looked fine, if only because it’s apparently easier to make a guy who’s on fire look like he’s really there, even making sure to get the heat distortion in the air right. Diamondhead didn’t translate well at all, and Grey Matter was even worse, particularly because they decided to show his transformation, which looked terrible done in live-action and CGI. Wildmutt didn’t look much better, possibly because his design is more cartoonish than some of the other aliens—a reason why I think Scooby-Doo never translates that well to CGI. But even in Stargate SG-1, a monster like Wildmutt looked a lot more impressive. To make matters worse, CGI Wildmutt picks up a CGI frozen-Gwen, who looks even more plastic than Wildmutt.
But alongside the acting, the greatest failing of this movie is the writing. The story is something that really could have been good: Ben struggles to readjust to normal life while an evil alternate future version of himself is trying to destroy the world. That’s the stuff of dreams. Unfortunately, it all falls apart quickly. Ben’s troubles at school and at home are touched upon without going into a whole lot of depth or resolution. Contrast Alien Swarm, where the sideplot of Ben’s feelings for Elena and her sense of betrayal was integral, with the constant question of if Ben really was blinded by his old love for her that he couldn’t think reasonably. His parents, while enjoyably spacey in Alien Force and Ultimate Alien, are so out-there that you wonder if Sandra’s found more than just wild sage growing in their backyard. And the adults Ben needs to depend on for this battle come off as so incompetent that it’s a wonder he made it this far into the schoolyear at all! By the time Grey Matter starts the food fight in the diner, you wonder if you’re not watching Ben’s progressive spiral downward as the bullying and the lack of sympathy from any relatives or adults brings him to a breaking point. Hell, with all that, it’d be no wonder he’d snap, disavow his own identity, and become a supervillain. Worked for Danny Phantom.
A major thing that drags this down is overuse of running gags. Ben 10 is a lighthearted cartoon that features some running gags. They’re used to death here. Yes, we get it, Grandpa Max eats weird stuff. It doesn’t mean that every time he’s on-screen, you need to show him eating something off of Bizarre Foods or No Reservations. And there’s only so much of Ed’s inability to find the right key for anything before you snap like Doris did and take a hammer to a lockbox. Only, the audience member might not warn Ed to get out of the way before swinging. Also, the movie tries too hard at times to reach out to a new audience. They try to explain concepts like the Plumbers, and it’s so heavy-handed it’s facepalm-worthy. Ben’s only dealt with Plumber business his entire summer. How does he suddenly not know what they are?
And finally, because I can’t stress it enough, the Eon plot made no sense. Was he a separate alien, or was he Ben? Did he want to kill Ben, or did he want to possess Ben? I’ve watched this movie at least six times now, and I’ve slowly moved more toward the “Eon is Ben” theory, but it still doesn’t account for everything that happens in the story. I feel like the script went through major rewrites, with one version being that a new alien attacked Ben and another version being that an evil alternate future Ben attacked, and then the network shot it down. I figure if this is the case, the original idea was “Evil Future Ben” and it got shot down because they already had the “Ben 10,000” episode to deal with a future Ben who wasn’t exactly ideal. Either way, the plot contradicts itself and is hard to make sense of, which is really bad when dealing with your big bad.
Race Against Time was written by Mitch Watson, with story by Thomas Pugsley and Greg Kline, directed by Alex Winter. Graham Phillips played Ben, Haley Ramm played Gwen, and Lee Majors played Max. Christien Anholt played Eon. David Franklin played Heatblast, Carlos Alazraqui as Grey Matter, Daran Norris as Diamondhead, and Dee Bradley Baker reprised his role of Wildmutt. Aloma Wright and Robert Picardo played Doris Dalton and Ed White. Don McManus and Beth Littleford played Ben’s parents, Carl and Sandra.
