Trust your heart: “Ben 10: Alien Swarm”
Dec. 11th, 2009 05:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akinoameAn alien tech deal goes wrong when one of the sellers turns out to be Ben’s old friend Elena Validus, who moved away when her father supposedly quit the Plumbers three years ago. She asks Ben for help finding her father and warns him that Grandpa Max has been lying to him, but before Ben can get an explanation, the alien chips activate and attack, all controlled by a mysterious man. Worse, the chips are having a weird effect on the Omnitrix. When Ben and the team head to their new command center to examine the chips, Elena follows them and is ordered out by Max, who says that her father had stolen these very chips three years ago and had been kicked out of the Plumbers because of it. The Validus family was blacklisted, and Max forbids Ben from helping Elena. Ben, however, doesn’t believe that Elena should be punished for whatever her father may have done. Angrily, he quits the Plumbers and steals Max’s motorcycle to go chase after Elena.
While Ben and Elena are investigating a makeshift lab where her father was studying the chips, they’re attacked by people possessed by them. At the same time, Gwen explains to Kevin about Ben’s history with Elena and Kevin admits that even he’s suspicious about how Max refuses to tell them anything and has effectively cut off anyone associated with Victor Validus. They hack Max’s files and discover video of the interrogation, where a desperate Victor pleads with Max to listen. He insists the chips are alive, an alien known as the Hive, and they’re planning something. But Max is too angry and hurt to listen. Realizing that Ben was right, Gwen and Kevin track down where the chips were coming from—a shipping company called Ship-It—only to be attacked by the possessed clerk and a swarm of Hive drones. Fortunately for them, Ben and Elena had found the same connection and are nearby, just in time for Ben to turn Humongousaur and save them…at the expense of Kevin’s car. But now that they’re working the same case and the Hive is too dangerous for them to leave Elena on her own, Ben insists that they all work together on this. They return to the Comm. Center and reveal everything to Max, about how he was wrong and everything they’ve found so far. While he still doesn’t trust Elena, even he can see that the evidence doesn’t lie—he’s getting reports of activity from Plumbers stationed all over the planet, and now they know it’s connected to the Hive. While he tries to dissect the drones for an answer, the kids have to analyze the rest of the evidence. But when Ben goes into Max’s office later to ask for help with a map analysis, he discovers to his horror that Max has been possessed by one of the Hive drone they brought back with them. Max attacks Ben, but he’s briefly knocked out by Kevin, giving them enough time to get him in a chair so they can question him. The possessed Max reveals that the Hive are planning on taking over the planet, replicating so they can control and eventually replace humanity. But though he’s possessed, Max still retains his intelligence, and he manages to create a smokescreen to cloud his escape through the tunnels he knows better than the kids do.
Now on their own, the team realizes that the Hive’s Queen has to be at the Ship-It distribution center in Barren Rock, Missouri, but they have no way of getting there without Kevin’s car. However, Kevin has a solution to that problem—a car he built for Ben’s birthday two months ago but never quite got around to finishing…or actually giving to Ben for that matter. After a short argument over who gets to drive (which Ben wins by pointing out he can always turn Humongousaur and throw the car to Missouri), they head to Barren Rock, where it seems like the entire town was possessed and is now readying the Hive for transport all around the world. Sneaking past Max inside to the heart of the operation, they get a better look at the mysterious man pulling the strings—Elena’s father. The team confronts her about lying to them, and she argues that their reaction is exactly why she didn’t want to tell them the truth. Ben argues that she didn’t know them as well as she thought, and when Gwen realizes that the replication inside Victor means the Queen is inside him, Kevin insists that the only course of action to save the world is for Ben to kill Victor. Ben, however, argues that Victor’s possessed just like Max was, and he won’t kill victims. Instead, he plans to use the Omnitrix—which has been scanning the drones all the time—to become a drone himself, get inside, and defeat the Queen. When Gwen argues that it’s too dangerous and he may lose himself to the Queen’s control, Ben insists that he has to put his faith in the Omnitrix to protect him, just as he’s putting his faith in his friends to handle things on the outside. Ben then transforms into the new alien Nanomech, a more humanoid version of the drones, and fights off the Queen while the rest of the team fights off the possessed humans. While his friends struggle on the outside, Nanomech only just manages to fight off the Queen’s hypnotic voice on the inside, ignoring her insistence that as a more powerful drone, he should be helping her gain dominance over the humans. But Nanomech stubbornly insists on his own human heritage and fights back, managing to destroy her and all the drones.
As everyone returns to normal, Elena runs over to her father, the nightmare finally over. Kevin and Gwen hug, and when Ben makes his way over asking what he gets for saving the world, Elena comes over and hugs him. But it soon dawns on him that they haven’t found Max yet, and he makes his way through the crowd to the outside, where Max says he’s got a lot of nerve for disobeying orders and quitting—but he did the right thing the whole time, and Max hugs him. The team and the Validus family makes their way over to Ben’s car, and Max and Victor finally apologize to one another for their mistakes three years ago. Victor thanks Ben for saving him, and Ben insists the thanks should go to Elena, who simply responds that it was the team’s work. Gwen adds that they’ve got a great leader, which Max agrees to…giving the honor to Ben. It takes some convincing by the others to get Ben to accept the job, but he does, and the quartet readies themselves for the new changes. As Gwen and Elena argue about Elena’s place on the team, Kevin tries to get the keys back from Ben, who says no. From now on, he’s taking the wheel.
Elena Validus is a new character created for the movie, and I personally hope she’ll stick around for Evolutions next year. As a fellow Plumber’s Kid, she grew up alongside Ben and Gwen in Bellwood, listening to the stories that her father told her. However, as she points out, unlike Ben and Gwen she has no alien heritage and no powers. She and Ben were best friends, and Ben had a massive crush on her—so bad that as Gwen points out, Ben couldn’t kick the soccer ball straight whenever she was around. When they were trying out for the soccer team, none of the other kids wanted a girl on the team, but Ben stood up for her and got the guys to come around, and Elena made MVP at the end of the year. But the budding puppy love came to an abrupt end when Elena’s father was accused and convicted of stealing alien technology, and they had to leave Bellwood and cut off all contact with anyone connected to the Plumbers, including Ben.
Elena is a tough-as-nails character, but as the movie progresses, it becomes clear that this is just a front to survive. She’s bitter about the treatment she and her father received from the Plumbers, and she uses the anger to keep going and not succumb to the fear and pain of her father’s possession by the Hive. She comes off as haughty around most of the cast, but around Ben, her sharp edges soften. Ben was her best friend, and it’s obvious he’s the only one she feels she can trust, as she took such pains to get his help despite being blacklisted by his own organization. Ben, already an open character, feels comfortable talking to Elena about more private thoughts too, as he confesses that he feels a burden from the Omnitrix that no one else in the universe can understand, and Elena admits that she’s beginning to understand what he feels about having the weight of the world on his shoulders. But for all she trusts Ben and for all he trusts her, she still holds back information, and Ben can see that, which makes him question his trust in her.
The dual theme of trust and betrayal is a major one throughout Alien Swarm. The backstory begins with an apparent betrayal: Victor Validus, in an attempt to stop an alien threat on his own (which he probably did not trust the Plumbers with), stole what appeared to be alien computer chips from the Plumber vault. And because Max didn’t believe him when he tried to explain what happened, the Plumbers blacklisted his family, which Elena saw as a major betrayal. When things became too dire for Elena on her own, she sought help from the only person she could trust, Ben Tennyson, but she was afraid that he would only turn on her if he knew the whole truth, so she couldn’t trust him with the full details of what had happened to her father.
Ben, in turn, was forced to question his trust in everyone. Upon learning that Max lied to him about the circumstances of Elena’s departure, he began to doubt his trust in his grandfather. His loss of trust in Max culminated in him quitting the team, believing the Plumbers were in the wrong for not trying to help a friend. His heroic vision of Max as a brilliant leader and a man who could do no wrong is irrevocably shattered, even though they reconcile at movie’s end. Believe it or not, the broken pedestal is probably one of the best things that ever happened to Ben, as it forces him to stop trying to emulate his grandfather and become his own man. At the same time, no matter how much Ben wanted to trust Elena, he couldn’t help but remember his friends’ warnings that she could have been setting him up, and throughout the investigation, he’s on the lookout for a possible betrayal. Elena earns his full trust by the time they reunite with Kevin and Gwen, but she only abuses it when it’s revealed that she was lying about her father having disappeared and that she didn’t know who was controlling the Hive. She doesn’t completely trust him no matter how much he trusts her, and this give-and-take relationship drives Ben’s decisions throughout.
Despite everything he doubts, Ben does know there are some people he can trust. Kevin and Gwen refused to abandon him after he left, even though Max insisted to them that Ben would have to be on his own if he was going to break Plumber ranks and essentially be blacklisted himself. Kevin, in particular, questioned Max’s reaction and began trying to hack his files when Max wouldn’t explain what happened. From the start, it appeared that he was on Ben’s side, only refusing to join Ben because he said that someone needed to keep an eye on Max. This makes sense, as Ben was the one who recruited Kevin. He’s the one who befriended him despite their history as enemies, fought alongside him, and earned his trust. For all Max was their leader, he didn’t have the chance to build the strong relationship Ben and Kevin had, so it’s no surprise that Kevin’s going to trust the more open Ben than the more secretive Max. And Gwen, for all she wanted to side with Max, felt her loyalties torn because Ben was in danger. Ultimately, they decided that their loyalties lay with Ben, and they hacked the files and realized Max had been in the wrong the entire time and the Validus family—and now Ben—were being punished for it.
Ben is also forced to put his unwavering faith in the Omnitrix, something that has not always been reliable in the past (see the entirety of Ben 10 and season three of Alien Force). The Hive’s presence interferes with the Omnitrix, so it doesn’t work properly in their presence, such as transforming Ben into Big Chill when he wanted Spidermonkey or just not allowing a transformation at all unless he’s far enough away from them. Ben realizes, however, that the Omnitrix has been acquiring the Hive’s DNA from a distance and has been trying to make sense of it to create a new transformation, Nanomech. Ben insists that this has been the Omnitrix’s plan the entire time, giving him a nonlethal alternative to save the world. But while Gwen, Elena, and Kevin insist that Ben can’t be sure if the Omnitrix will protect him from the Queen and just becoming a slave himself, Ben insists that he has to put his full trust in the watch to see him through. He also insists to them that he trusts them to handle things on the outside while he tries to destroy the Queen and render the chips inert.
And brought to light by the conflict of trust and betrayal is the issue of leadership. Alien Force explored Ben’s journey to becoming a leader, from his despair in “Ben 10 Returns” that he wouldn’t be able to do the job without Max to guide him, to taking the reins to save the world in “Max Out,” to proving his worth in “Voided,” to finally leading the team to victory and peace in “War of the Worlds.” Ben created the team, and it’s his bonds with Gwen and Kevin that really hold it together. Season three sets the team as more-or-less as SG-1 with Max as General Hammond, trusting Ben to lead out in the field while he gets the reports. Alien Swarm takes that General/Field Commander route and adds that Max gets the final say on whatever the team does. But after such a long time spent with Ben as the sole leader and having been the one to build the team in the first place, it’s a system that can’t work. Ben, already learning to be his own man, only feels more pressure to break from Max after doubting his trust in him. And the team looks to Ben for everything. Gwen and Kevin put their careers on the line and risk Max’s ire to hack the files they need to help Ben. It barely takes any convincing for Kevin to get Gwen to go along with it, and they both know they need to help him. When Ben says that he trusts Elena and she’s coming along with them to finish the case, they can’t argue with him anymore. And when Max gives everyone their assignments to investigate the Hive in the lab, it’s Ben who organizes them to get moving and tells Gwen and Elena to get some sleep even when Max said nobody was sleeping that night. It becomes clear that at the end, when Gwen says that the Plumbers “have a good leader,” she’s not talking about Max, and he knows it. Ben has managed to get these people to work together even when they don’t always like each other, he cares deeply about them and is willing to take on more responsibility and risks for their sake, and he is willing to fight for his own convictions. He’s no longer Max’s soldier—he’s stepped out of the shadow at long last and has become a leader and hero in his own right.
When Alien Swarm was announced, people began to groan, remembering the travesty that was Race Against Time. I enjoyed Race Against Time, but I also admit that it was a bad movie. It had a good setup but a poor follow-through: with the plot of Eon trying to resurrect himself through Ben and use the Hands of Armageddon to start a massive invasion of the planet, it had the potential for a lot of character development, particularly with the revelation that Max knew Eon’s real plan the whole time and refused to tell Ben. Sadly, it ignored the character plot, and the storyline was overly complicated for a 90 minute movie—it tried to do too much too fast, and the plotline stopped making sense. For example, half the time Eon was treated as a separate alien who simply knew a lot about the Omnitrix, and the other half, he was treated as an evil future Ben, ala Dark Danny in Danny Phantom: The Ultimate Enemy. And in trying to be too much like the source series, Race Against Time didn’t translate well into a live-action film. Too many aliens were thrown in (did we seriously need that scene of Grey Matter starting a food fight?) and in trying to emulate the morphing sequence of the series, it looked ridiculous. The aliens themselves were not much better, as only Heatblast translated decently into CGI, and the rest spiraled downward from there. To make matters worse, the actors playing Ben and Gwen had no real chemistry together, and they didn’t feel like they had much of a handle on the characters they were playing.
Alien Swarm, while certainly not perfect, takes a lot of the issues Race Against Time had and fixed them. The storyline is far simpler—an old friend of Ben’s returns under suspicious circumstances, seeking his help to find her father, whose disappearance is connected to a new alien threat. This gives the story plenty of time to focus on the characters, particularly its hero. When Ben learns that Max has lied to him for three years about the circumstances of Elena’s departure, he doubts his trust in him—just as in the source series, Ben’s own father had doubted his trust in both Max and Ben for the years of lies. Ben’s issues of faith and betrayal become the driving force of the story, tying him to it. This is a story about Ben, not a story about an alien threat. Replace Ben with any other character, and it won’t be the same story; the same can’t be said for Race Against Time. In taking place one year after Alien Force began, it creates a sense of distance—Ben and the team have had time to grow up a little, get used to the flow of things following the events of season three, and set the stage for the next series. Ben doesn’t have to be the exact same Ben in Alien Force because he’s had this time to adjust, which no doubt relieved Ryan Kelley upon seeing season three. The movie definitely has good action sequences, but they’re not as overdone as in Race Against Time.
Only three alien forms are used: Big Chill, Humongousaur, and finally Nanomech, which allows the CGI budget to be passed around for Gwen, Kevin, and the Hive as well. Admittedly, the CGI isn’t perfect—only Gwen’s powers really seem to look fairly natural, aided by the fact that they limited it to energy blasts rather than the pink glass effect given in the series. Kevin’s transformations are only ever shown from a distance and for a short time, as the technology really isn’t good enough to make it look spectacular. Furthermore, Ben’s aliens are a little hit-or-miss: Big Chill is kind of iffy, Humongousaur (whose design was slightly altered to look a little more Godzilla-ish) doesn’t quite fit, and Nanomech actually does look fairly impressive. But for a movie meant for TV and in contrast to Race Against Time two years ago, it’s still pretty good. Ben’s transformation sequences were also changed to fit the more realistic, gritty atmosphere built for the movie. Rather than going for a full-out sequence, they did a gradual morph, allowing Ben to run into the action while his body changed to alien form, giving more of an X-Men feel than Power Rangers. It also set up for Nanomech’s transformation, where Ben is confused when it looks like it didn’t work, only to look up and see Gwen and Kevin towering over him before the morph finishes. This emphasis on more realism is one thing it actually does share with its source series: Ben isn’t supposed to be a superhero, he’s supposed to be an alien, and they make sure the sequences reflect that.
Furthermore, the characters all have excellent chemistry with one another: Gwen argues with Ben over him trying to have his own way all the time and honestly sounds hurt by his actions. Ben teases Gwen that he doesn’t get what Gwen sees in Kevin after Kevin follows them into the elevator eating cold pizza and drinking a soda. Kevin and Ben banter back and forth over just about everything, particularly the cars. And Kevin and Gwen have an…interesting relationship, with him teasingly making a move and her annoyed at his jokes. With Elena, it’s no different: Gwen’s animosity for her feels real, which is surprising given that they appear to be fairly good friends off-screen, and Ben’s complicated relationship with her really does make you wonder if he’s trying to do the right thing or just still feeling his crush. Behind-the-scenes videos and photos released before the movie indicate that the four were constantly together, building a good friendship, and it definitely reflects in the movie, much like how Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint built a close friendship in their years doing Harry Potter. In addition, at Comic Con it was revealed that all four actors were big fans of the series, particularly Nathan Keyes and Ryan Kelley (who is active on Toonzone’s forums and Dwayne McDuffie’s messageboard). This also reflects, as Keyes and Kelley certainly nail their characters, particularly in scenes together.
And on a sidenote about the movie separating itself to some extent from the series, it’s interesting to note that Ben and Gwen constantly call their grandfather “Max” throughout the movie, only calling him “Grandpa” when something’s wrong. On Ben’s side, it can be explained by his loss of trust in him, but he continues it even at the end. Similarly, there’s no reason Gwen should be as distant. In the series, they always call him “Grandpa Max,” and the only time either of them ever simply referred to him as “Max” was when Gwen was talking to Verdona in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” There, she was already distant from her grandmother, and she was trying to speak to her on the same level of “two energy beings,” while still emphasizing her own humanity. I don’t know if Ben and Gwen will continue to do this into Ben 10: Evolutions, but it does emphasize their separation from him, with Ben having built his own team and now leading it, and the fact that throughout Alien Force, Max simply had not been there for his grandkids when they needed it. Now, the kids are all grown up, and they’ve grown without him.
The brand new alien introduced this movie is Nanomech, an implied hybrid of human DNA and the Hive’s technorganic data. Unlike the Hive drones, he has a humanoid appearance and an independent mind, able to fight off the Queen’s hypnotic voice both ordering and seducing him to forsake humanity and usher in the reign of the Hive. But Ben argues that as Nanomech, he’s half-human, and this gives him the sheer stubbornness to keep fighting, adapting the Queen’s own attacks as his own and using them against her, managing to defeat her. This continues the season one and two theme of hybrid vigor, that by mixing genetics, you get the best traits of the different races.
Another theme running concurrent with the leadership theme is the simple fact that Ben is growing up. I don’t know if this theme is why they looked to casting an older actor against the teens playing Gwen and Kevin, but it is by no means a slight against Ryan Kelley’s portrayal. He does well taking the characterization of Ben from seasons one and two and showing the progression of a young man on his way to becoming a hero in his own right. Among the milestones reached is the right to drive, which comes when Kevin presents him with a late birthday present of a new car (and as Ben mentions that his birthday was “two months ago,” and Gwen notes that it’s February, this places his birthday sometime in December), and Ben is more than willing to finally take the wheel. But along with finally being allowed to drive the team (something Kevin’s forbidden Ben from doing since the incident in “Paradox”), Ben also proves to Max that he’s mature enough to take on the role of leader for good now. It’s clear that Max no longer sees him as the little boy he needed to teach and protect, nor as the soldier and field commander, but as the hero the rest of the galaxy respects him as.
And because the RPM fans had fun putting Corinth right in the middle of Boston when the coordinates were named, I decided to try and play with the coordinates of Bellwood that Kevin entered into the computer. 38 degrees north and 96 degrees west firmly places it in the state of Kansas, around Chase County. Which I’m fairly certain is nowhere near the desert, as is heavily featured throughout season two (“Save the Last Dance,” “Undercover,” “Inside Man,” “Unearthed,” “War of the Worlds,” and season one’s “Paradox”). I’m also positive it’s nowhere near a beach (“In Charm’s Way,” and the Pier from “Pier Pressure”). But it is near Missouri, at least.
The casting was pretty solid. For the new characters, Elena and Victor, they’re handled very well. Alyssa Diaz manages to maintain this tough, haughty façade for Elena, with sharp edges that seem to soften around Ben, her only friend. She does an excellent job building up the emotion, maintaining the barriers of anger and self-assuredness around the rest of the team, showing her worry over her father, and everything culminating in the Ship-It center, with her pleading desperately with Ben to save her father and at the end of the battle, giving her first genuine smile. Herbert Siguenza does a wonderful job maintaining the dual nature of the possessed Victor, showing his fear and desperation in the interrogation and his apologetic reunion with Max, Elena, and the team, as well as appearing very creepy and insane while possessed. The way Victor constantly talks to himself is similar vocally to Gollum in Lord of the Rings, but it’s handled like a creepy and dangerous schizophrenic rather than a split personality.
As said above, Nathan Keyes and Ryan Kelley have an excellent handle on Kevin and Ben. Keyes performs Kevin very understated and fairly uninterested…and then something happens to his car. Then he’s loudly complaining. He also has the sarcasm down pat, whether arguing with Ben or presumably flirting with Gwen to her annoyance. Kelley’s Ben is the leader from season two—serious on the job, but with a sense of humor and a fairly light personality otherwise. He’s slightly cocky, but not in-your-face and arrogant about it—it’s part of his sense of humor and his sarcasm. His Ben has an unwavering faith in himself and in his friends, and he’s very determined.
Grandpa Max and Gwen I did have a couple of issues about. Barry Corbin did a good job playing the character of Max Tennyson of Alien Swarm, but I can’t quite say he’s the Grandpa Max from the two cartoons. It seems like he’s got a little too much emotion for it, in comparison to the slightly more laidback cartoon Max. However, he handles the anger and betrayal from Victor well, and he’s creepy as all hell while possessed. Galadriel Stineman is a good actress, but like with Barry Corbin’s Max, I don’t feel like she’s quite Gwen. Instead of being the cool head of the group, she’s the one arguing with Ben and Elena the entire time, suspicious of the new girl. This I think is more of a writing issue than anything else. I’ve complained in the past that Gwen in Alien Force really hasn’t seemed like she had much more to her than being the rock of the team, and in Ben 10, I found her frequently a bit of an insufferable know-it-all. Alien Swarm Gwen doesn’t act like that, but she is considerably more confrontational than Alien Force Gwen. I’m not quite sure if I like that or not, but looking at Alien Swarm as a separate entity in itself, I can say that for this Gwen, Stineman is a pretty good fit.
The special features on the DVD are nothing to write home about: just a behind-the-scenes video and a music video. The behind-the-scenes piece was really more of an extended trailer, not revealing anything more than what you can figure out from the trailers themselves. Cartoon Network’s own video site has more informational and interesting background stuff for the movie. And the music video is for “A Little Faster” by There For Tomorrow, a song heavily advertised by hardly featured in the movie. In fact, the movie only plays the opening bars of the music when Ben’s driving to Barren Rock, and because there are no lyrics, it comes off as so unremarkable that it could have been replaced by an original score easily enough—not what you want to pay the rights for.
Ben 10: Alien Swarm was directed by Alex Winter, who was also the executive producer. The script was written by John Turman and Jim Krieg. Ryan Kelley played Ben, Galadriel Steinman played Gwen, Nathan Keyes played Kevin, and Alyssa Diaz played Elena. Barry Corbin played Grandpa Max, and Herbert Siguenza played Dr. Validus. Dee Bradley Baker provided the voices of Big Chill and Humongousaur (presumably, as he just roared), while Alex Winter provided the voice of Nanomech. The Queen was voiced by Wendy Cutler.
While Ben and Elena are investigating a makeshift lab where her father was studying the chips, they’re attacked by people possessed by them. At the same time, Gwen explains to Kevin about Ben’s history with Elena and Kevin admits that even he’s suspicious about how Max refuses to tell them anything and has effectively cut off anyone associated with Victor Validus. They hack Max’s files and discover video of the interrogation, where a desperate Victor pleads with Max to listen. He insists the chips are alive, an alien known as the Hive, and they’re planning something. But Max is too angry and hurt to listen. Realizing that Ben was right, Gwen and Kevin track down where the chips were coming from—a shipping company called Ship-It—only to be attacked by the possessed clerk and a swarm of Hive drones. Fortunately for them, Ben and Elena had found the same connection and are nearby, just in time for Ben to turn Humongousaur and save them…at the expense of Kevin’s car. But now that they’re working the same case and the Hive is too dangerous for them to leave Elena on her own, Ben insists that they all work together on this. They return to the Comm. Center and reveal everything to Max, about how he was wrong and everything they’ve found so far. While he still doesn’t trust Elena, even he can see that the evidence doesn’t lie—he’s getting reports of activity from Plumbers stationed all over the planet, and now they know it’s connected to the Hive. While he tries to dissect the drones for an answer, the kids have to analyze the rest of the evidence. But when Ben goes into Max’s office later to ask for help with a map analysis, he discovers to his horror that Max has been possessed by one of the Hive drone they brought back with them. Max attacks Ben, but he’s briefly knocked out by Kevin, giving them enough time to get him in a chair so they can question him. The possessed Max reveals that the Hive are planning on taking over the planet, replicating so they can control and eventually replace humanity. But though he’s possessed, Max still retains his intelligence, and he manages to create a smokescreen to cloud his escape through the tunnels he knows better than the kids do.
Now on their own, the team realizes that the Hive’s Queen has to be at the Ship-It distribution center in Barren Rock, Missouri, but they have no way of getting there without Kevin’s car. However, Kevin has a solution to that problem—a car he built for Ben’s birthday two months ago but never quite got around to finishing…or actually giving to Ben for that matter. After a short argument over who gets to drive (which Ben wins by pointing out he can always turn Humongousaur and throw the car to Missouri), they head to Barren Rock, where it seems like the entire town was possessed and is now readying the Hive for transport all around the world. Sneaking past Max inside to the heart of the operation, they get a better look at the mysterious man pulling the strings—Elena’s father. The team confronts her about lying to them, and she argues that their reaction is exactly why she didn’t want to tell them the truth. Ben argues that she didn’t know them as well as she thought, and when Gwen realizes that the replication inside Victor means the Queen is inside him, Kevin insists that the only course of action to save the world is for Ben to kill Victor. Ben, however, argues that Victor’s possessed just like Max was, and he won’t kill victims. Instead, he plans to use the Omnitrix—which has been scanning the drones all the time—to become a drone himself, get inside, and defeat the Queen. When Gwen argues that it’s too dangerous and he may lose himself to the Queen’s control, Ben insists that he has to put his faith in the Omnitrix to protect him, just as he’s putting his faith in his friends to handle things on the outside. Ben then transforms into the new alien Nanomech, a more humanoid version of the drones, and fights off the Queen while the rest of the team fights off the possessed humans. While his friends struggle on the outside, Nanomech only just manages to fight off the Queen’s hypnotic voice on the inside, ignoring her insistence that as a more powerful drone, he should be helping her gain dominance over the humans. But Nanomech stubbornly insists on his own human heritage and fights back, managing to destroy her and all the drones.
As everyone returns to normal, Elena runs over to her father, the nightmare finally over. Kevin and Gwen hug, and when Ben makes his way over asking what he gets for saving the world, Elena comes over and hugs him. But it soon dawns on him that they haven’t found Max yet, and he makes his way through the crowd to the outside, where Max says he’s got a lot of nerve for disobeying orders and quitting—but he did the right thing the whole time, and Max hugs him. The team and the Validus family makes their way over to Ben’s car, and Max and Victor finally apologize to one another for their mistakes three years ago. Victor thanks Ben for saving him, and Ben insists the thanks should go to Elena, who simply responds that it was the team’s work. Gwen adds that they’ve got a great leader, which Max agrees to…giving the honor to Ben. It takes some convincing by the others to get Ben to accept the job, but he does, and the quartet readies themselves for the new changes. As Gwen and Elena argue about Elena’s place on the team, Kevin tries to get the keys back from Ben, who says no. From now on, he’s taking the wheel.
Elena Validus is a new character created for the movie, and I personally hope she’ll stick around for Evolutions next year. As a fellow Plumber’s Kid, she grew up alongside Ben and Gwen in Bellwood, listening to the stories that her father told her. However, as she points out, unlike Ben and Gwen she has no alien heritage and no powers. She and Ben were best friends, and Ben had a massive crush on her—so bad that as Gwen points out, Ben couldn’t kick the soccer ball straight whenever she was around. When they were trying out for the soccer team, none of the other kids wanted a girl on the team, but Ben stood up for her and got the guys to come around, and Elena made MVP at the end of the year. But the budding puppy love came to an abrupt end when Elena’s father was accused and convicted of stealing alien technology, and they had to leave Bellwood and cut off all contact with anyone connected to the Plumbers, including Ben.
Elena is a tough-as-nails character, but as the movie progresses, it becomes clear that this is just a front to survive. She’s bitter about the treatment she and her father received from the Plumbers, and she uses the anger to keep going and not succumb to the fear and pain of her father’s possession by the Hive. She comes off as haughty around most of the cast, but around Ben, her sharp edges soften. Ben was her best friend, and it’s obvious he’s the only one she feels she can trust, as she took such pains to get his help despite being blacklisted by his own organization. Ben, already an open character, feels comfortable talking to Elena about more private thoughts too, as he confesses that he feels a burden from the Omnitrix that no one else in the universe can understand, and Elena admits that she’s beginning to understand what he feels about having the weight of the world on his shoulders. But for all she trusts Ben and for all he trusts her, she still holds back information, and Ben can see that, which makes him question his trust in her.
The dual theme of trust and betrayal is a major one throughout Alien Swarm. The backstory begins with an apparent betrayal: Victor Validus, in an attempt to stop an alien threat on his own (which he probably did not trust the Plumbers with), stole what appeared to be alien computer chips from the Plumber vault. And because Max didn’t believe him when he tried to explain what happened, the Plumbers blacklisted his family, which Elena saw as a major betrayal. When things became too dire for Elena on her own, she sought help from the only person she could trust, Ben Tennyson, but she was afraid that he would only turn on her if he knew the whole truth, so she couldn’t trust him with the full details of what had happened to her father.
Ben, in turn, was forced to question his trust in everyone. Upon learning that Max lied to him about the circumstances of Elena’s departure, he began to doubt his trust in his grandfather. His loss of trust in Max culminated in him quitting the team, believing the Plumbers were in the wrong for not trying to help a friend. His heroic vision of Max as a brilliant leader and a man who could do no wrong is irrevocably shattered, even though they reconcile at movie’s end. Believe it or not, the broken pedestal is probably one of the best things that ever happened to Ben, as it forces him to stop trying to emulate his grandfather and become his own man. At the same time, no matter how much Ben wanted to trust Elena, he couldn’t help but remember his friends’ warnings that she could have been setting him up, and throughout the investigation, he’s on the lookout for a possible betrayal. Elena earns his full trust by the time they reunite with Kevin and Gwen, but she only abuses it when it’s revealed that she was lying about her father having disappeared and that she didn’t know who was controlling the Hive. She doesn’t completely trust him no matter how much he trusts her, and this give-and-take relationship drives Ben’s decisions throughout.
Despite everything he doubts, Ben does know there are some people he can trust. Kevin and Gwen refused to abandon him after he left, even though Max insisted to them that Ben would have to be on his own if he was going to break Plumber ranks and essentially be blacklisted himself. Kevin, in particular, questioned Max’s reaction and began trying to hack his files when Max wouldn’t explain what happened. From the start, it appeared that he was on Ben’s side, only refusing to join Ben because he said that someone needed to keep an eye on Max. This makes sense, as Ben was the one who recruited Kevin. He’s the one who befriended him despite their history as enemies, fought alongside him, and earned his trust. For all Max was their leader, he didn’t have the chance to build the strong relationship Ben and Kevin had, so it’s no surprise that Kevin’s going to trust the more open Ben than the more secretive Max. And Gwen, for all she wanted to side with Max, felt her loyalties torn because Ben was in danger. Ultimately, they decided that their loyalties lay with Ben, and they hacked the files and realized Max had been in the wrong the entire time and the Validus family—and now Ben—were being punished for it.
Ben is also forced to put his unwavering faith in the Omnitrix, something that has not always been reliable in the past (see the entirety of Ben 10 and season three of Alien Force). The Hive’s presence interferes with the Omnitrix, so it doesn’t work properly in their presence, such as transforming Ben into Big Chill when he wanted Spidermonkey or just not allowing a transformation at all unless he’s far enough away from them. Ben realizes, however, that the Omnitrix has been acquiring the Hive’s DNA from a distance and has been trying to make sense of it to create a new transformation, Nanomech. Ben insists that this has been the Omnitrix’s plan the entire time, giving him a nonlethal alternative to save the world. But while Gwen, Elena, and Kevin insist that Ben can’t be sure if the Omnitrix will protect him from the Queen and just becoming a slave himself, Ben insists that he has to put his full trust in the watch to see him through. He also insists to them that he trusts them to handle things on the outside while he tries to destroy the Queen and render the chips inert.
And brought to light by the conflict of trust and betrayal is the issue of leadership. Alien Force explored Ben’s journey to becoming a leader, from his despair in “Ben 10 Returns” that he wouldn’t be able to do the job without Max to guide him, to taking the reins to save the world in “Max Out,” to proving his worth in “Voided,” to finally leading the team to victory and peace in “War of the Worlds.” Ben created the team, and it’s his bonds with Gwen and Kevin that really hold it together. Season three sets the team as more-or-less as SG-1 with Max as General Hammond, trusting Ben to lead out in the field while he gets the reports. Alien Swarm takes that General/Field Commander route and adds that Max gets the final say on whatever the team does. But after such a long time spent with Ben as the sole leader and having been the one to build the team in the first place, it’s a system that can’t work. Ben, already learning to be his own man, only feels more pressure to break from Max after doubting his trust in him. And the team looks to Ben for everything. Gwen and Kevin put their careers on the line and risk Max’s ire to hack the files they need to help Ben. It barely takes any convincing for Kevin to get Gwen to go along with it, and they both know they need to help him. When Ben says that he trusts Elena and she’s coming along with them to finish the case, they can’t argue with him anymore. And when Max gives everyone their assignments to investigate the Hive in the lab, it’s Ben who organizes them to get moving and tells Gwen and Elena to get some sleep even when Max said nobody was sleeping that night. It becomes clear that at the end, when Gwen says that the Plumbers “have a good leader,” she’s not talking about Max, and he knows it. Ben has managed to get these people to work together even when they don’t always like each other, he cares deeply about them and is willing to take on more responsibility and risks for their sake, and he is willing to fight for his own convictions. He’s no longer Max’s soldier—he’s stepped out of the shadow at long last and has become a leader and hero in his own right.
When Alien Swarm was announced, people began to groan, remembering the travesty that was Race Against Time. I enjoyed Race Against Time, but I also admit that it was a bad movie. It had a good setup but a poor follow-through: with the plot of Eon trying to resurrect himself through Ben and use the Hands of Armageddon to start a massive invasion of the planet, it had the potential for a lot of character development, particularly with the revelation that Max knew Eon’s real plan the whole time and refused to tell Ben. Sadly, it ignored the character plot, and the storyline was overly complicated for a 90 minute movie—it tried to do too much too fast, and the plotline stopped making sense. For example, half the time Eon was treated as a separate alien who simply knew a lot about the Omnitrix, and the other half, he was treated as an evil future Ben, ala Dark Danny in Danny Phantom: The Ultimate Enemy. And in trying to be too much like the source series, Race Against Time didn’t translate well into a live-action film. Too many aliens were thrown in (did we seriously need that scene of Grey Matter starting a food fight?) and in trying to emulate the morphing sequence of the series, it looked ridiculous. The aliens themselves were not much better, as only Heatblast translated decently into CGI, and the rest spiraled downward from there. To make matters worse, the actors playing Ben and Gwen had no real chemistry together, and they didn’t feel like they had much of a handle on the characters they were playing.
Alien Swarm, while certainly not perfect, takes a lot of the issues Race Against Time had and fixed them. The storyline is far simpler—an old friend of Ben’s returns under suspicious circumstances, seeking his help to find her father, whose disappearance is connected to a new alien threat. This gives the story plenty of time to focus on the characters, particularly its hero. When Ben learns that Max has lied to him for three years about the circumstances of Elena’s departure, he doubts his trust in him—just as in the source series, Ben’s own father had doubted his trust in both Max and Ben for the years of lies. Ben’s issues of faith and betrayal become the driving force of the story, tying him to it. This is a story about Ben, not a story about an alien threat. Replace Ben with any other character, and it won’t be the same story; the same can’t be said for Race Against Time. In taking place one year after Alien Force began, it creates a sense of distance—Ben and the team have had time to grow up a little, get used to the flow of things following the events of season three, and set the stage for the next series. Ben doesn’t have to be the exact same Ben in Alien Force because he’s had this time to adjust, which no doubt relieved Ryan Kelley upon seeing season three. The movie definitely has good action sequences, but they’re not as overdone as in Race Against Time.
Only three alien forms are used: Big Chill, Humongousaur, and finally Nanomech, which allows the CGI budget to be passed around for Gwen, Kevin, and the Hive as well. Admittedly, the CGI isn’t perfect—only Gwen’s powers really seem to look fairly natural, aided by the fact that they limited it to energy blasts rather than the pink glass effect given in the series. Kevin’s transformations are only ever shown from a distance and for a short time, as the technology really isn’t good enough to make it look spectacular. Furthermore, Ben’s aliens are a little hit-or-miss: Big Chill is kind of iffy, Humongousaur (whose design was slightly altered to look a little more Godzilla-ish) doesn’t quite fit, and Nanomech actually does look fairly impressive. But for a movie meant for TV and in contrast to Race Against Time two years ago, it’s still pretty good. Ben’s transformation sequences were also changed to fit the more realistic, gritty atmosphere built for the movie. Rather than going for a full-out sequence, they did a gradual morph, allowing Ben to run into the action while his body changed to alien form, giving more of an X-Men feel than Power Rangers. It also set up for Nanomech’s transformation, where Ben is confused when it looks like it didn’t work, only to look up and see Gwen and Kevin towering over him before the morph finishes. This emphasis on more realism is one thing it actually does share with its source series: Ben isn’t supposed to be a superhero, he’s supposed to be an alien, and they make sure the sequences reflect that.
Furthermore, the characters all have excellent chemistry with one another: Gwen argues with Ben over him trying to have his own way all the time and honestly sounds hurt by his actions. Ben teases Gwen that he doesn’t get what Gwen sees in Kevin after Kevin follows them into the elevator eating cold pizza and drinking a soda. Kevin and Ben banter back and forth over just about everything, particularly the cars. And Kevin and Gwen have an…interesting relationship, with him teasingly making a move and her annoyed at his jokes. With Elena, it’s no different: Gwen’s animosity for her feels real, which is surprising given that they appear to be fairly good friends off-screen, and Ben’s complicated relationship with her really does make you wonder if he’s trying to do the right thing or just still feeling his crush. Behind-the-scenes videos and photos released before the movie indicate that the four were constantly together, building a good friendship, and it definitely reflects in the movie, much like how Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint built a close friendship in their years doing Harry Potter. In addition, at Comic Con it was revealed that all four actors were big fans of the series, particularly Nathan Keyes and Ryan Kelley (who is active on Toonzone’s forums and Dwayne McDuffie’s messageboard). This also reflects, as Keyes and Kelley certainly nail their characters, particularly in scenes together.
And on a sidenote about the movie separating itself to some extent from the series, it’s interesting to note that Ben and Gwen constantly call their grandfather “Max” throughout the movie, only calling him “Grandpa” when something’s wrong. On Ben’s side, it can be explained by his loss of trust in him, but he continues it even at the end. Similarly, there’s no reason Gwen should be as distant. In the series, they always call him “Grandpa Max,” and the only time either of them ever simply referred to him as “Max” was when Gwen was talking to Verdona in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” There, she was already distant from her grandmother, and she was trying to speak to her on the same level of “two energy beings,” while still emphasizing her own humanity. I don’t know if Ben and Gwen will continue to do this into Ben 10: Evolutions, but it does emphasize their separation from him, with Ben having built his own team and now leading it, and the fact that throughout Alien Force, Max simply had not been there for his grandkids when they needed it. Now, the kids are all grown up, and they’ve grown without him.
The brand new alien introduced this movie is Nanomech, an implied hybrid of human DNA and the Hive’s technorganic data. Unlike the Hive drones, he has a humanoid appearance and an independent mind, able to fight off the Queen’s hypnotic voice both ordering and seducing him to forsake humanity and usher in the reign of the Hive. But Ben argues that as Nanomech, he’s half-human, and this gives him the sheer stubbornness to keep fighting, adapting the Queen’s own attacks as his own and using them against her, managing to defeat her. This continues the season one and two theme of hybrid vigor, that by mixing genetics, you get the best traits of the different races.
Another theme running concurrent with the leadership theme is the simple fact that Ben is growing up. I don’t know if this theme is why they looked to casting an older actor against the teens playing Gwen and Kevin, but it is by no means a slight against Ryan Kelley’s portrayal. He does well taking the characterization of Ben from seasons one and two and showing the progression of a young man on his way to becoming a hero in his own right. Among the milestones reached is the right to drive, which comes when Kevin presents him with a late birthday present of a new car (and as Ben mentions that his birthday was “two months ago,” and Gwen notes that it’s February, this places his birthday sometime in December), and Ben is more than willing to finally take the wheel. But along with finally being allowed to drive the team (something Kevin’s forbidden Ben from doing since the incident in “Paradox”), Ben also proves to Max that he’s mature enough to take on the role of leader for good now. It’s clear that Max no longer sees him as the little boy he needed to teach and protect, nor as the soldier and field commander, but as the hero the rest of the galaxy respects him as.
And because the RPM fans had fun putting Corinth right in the middle of Boston when the coordinates were named, I decided to try and play with the coordinates of Bellwood that Kevin entered into the computer. 38 degrees north and 96 degrees west firmly places it in the state of Kansas, around Chase County. Which I’m fairly certain is nowhere near the desert, as is heavily featured throughout season two (“Save the Last Dance,” “Undercover,” “Inside Man,” “Unearthed,” “War of the Worlds,” and season one’s “Paradox”). I’m also positive it’s nowhere near a beach (“In Charm’s Way,” and the Pier from “Pier Pressure”). But it is near Missouri, at least.
The casting was pretty solid. For the new characters, Elena and Victor, they’re handled very well. Alyssa Diaz manages to maintain this tough, haughty façade for Elena, with sharp edges that seem to soften around Ben, her only friend. She does an excellent job building up the emotion, maintaining the barriers of anger and self-assuredness around the rest of the team, showing her worry over her father, and everything culminating in the Ship-It center, with her pleading desperately with Ben to save her father and at the end of the battle, giving her first genuine smile. Herbert Siguenza does a wonderful job maintaining the dual nature of the possessed Victor, showing his fear and desperation in the interrogation and his apologetic reunion with Max, Elena, and the team, as well as appearing very creepy and insane while possessed. The way Victor constantly talks to himself is similar vocally to Gollum in Lord of the Rings, but it’s handled like a creepy and dangerous schizophrenic rather than a split personality.
As said above, Nathan Keyes and Ryan Kelley have an excellent handle on Kevin and Ben. Keyes performs Kevin very understated and fairly uninterested…and then something happens to his car. Then he’s loudly complaining. He also has the sarcasm down pat, whether arguing with Ben or presumably flirting with Gwen to her annoyance. Kelley’s Ben is the leader from season two—serious on the job, but with a sense of humor and a fairly light personality otherwise. He’s slightly cocky, but not in-your-face and arrogant about it—it’s part of his sense of humor and his sarcasm. His Ben has an unwavering faith in himself and in his friends, and he’s very determined.
Grandpa Max and Gwen I did have a couple of issues about. Barry Corbin did a good job playing the character of Max Tennyson of Alien Swarm, but I can’t quite say he’s the Grandpa Max from the two cartoons. It seems like he’s got a little too much emotion for it, in comparison to the slightly more laidback cartoon Max. However, he handles the anger and betrayal from Victor well, and he’s creepy as all hell while possessed. Galadriel Stineman is a good actress, but like with Barry Corbin’s Max, I don’t feel like she’s quite Gwen. Instead of being the cool head of the group, she’s the one arguing with Ben and Elena the entire time, suspicious of the new girl. This I think is more of a writing issue than anything else. I’ve complained in the past that Gwen in Alien Force really hasn’t seemed like she had much more to her than being the rock of the team, and in Ben 10, I found her frequently a bit of an insufferable know-it-all. Alien Swarm Gwen doesn’t act like that, but she is considerably more confrontational than Alien Force Gwen. I’m not quite sure if I like that or not, but looking at Alien Swarm as a separate entity in itself, I can say that for this Gwen, Stineman is a pretty good fit.
The special features on the DVD are nothing to write home about: just a behind-the-scenes video and a music video. The behind-the-scenes piece was really more of an extended trailer, not revealing anything more than what you can figure out from the trailers themselves. Cartoon Network’s own video site has more informational and interesting background stuff for the movie. And the music video is for “A Little Faster” by There For Tomorrow, a song heavily advertised by hardly featured in the movie. In fact, the movie only plays the opening bars of the music when Ben’s driving to Barren Rock, and because there are no lyrics, it comes off as so unremarkable that it could have been replaced by an original score easily enough—not what you want to pay the rights for.
Ben 10: Alien Swarm was directed by Alex Winter, who was also the executive producer. The script was written by John Turman and Jim Krieg. Ryan Kelley played Ben, Galadriel Steinman played Gwen, Nathan Keyes played Kevin, and Alyssa Diaz played Elena. Barry Corbin played Grandpa Max, and Herbert Siguenza played Dr. Validus. Dee Bradley Baker provided the voices of Big Chill and Humongousaur (presumably, as he just roared), while Alex Winter provided the voice of Nanomech. The Queen was voiced by Wendy Cutler.
