Allen review – what would happen if ET came back for Elliott as an adult? Turns out nothing great

This good-natured if relentlessly unsubtle family film from Netflix and the studio behind Bluey relies on a cute alien with no personality

It’s important for stories about magical formative experiences to make the point that time marches forward. Puff the Magic Dragon slinks back into his cave; Max bids farewell to the Wild Things and returns home; the snowman melts, leaving behind only a hat and scarf. It’s not just about the passage of time, but the melancholic act of saying goodbye – the child moving on, the experience imprinted on to their psyches.

Allen, the first live-action feature from Ludo Studio – the production company behind a little show called Bluey – has a quirky point of difference. Instead of following a child who befriends a cute little alien then grows into a man enriched by the brief relationship, that child becomes a manchild – unable to move on and haunted by the feeling that his best days are behind him. This twist on convention is enough to pique our interest, but not to sustain it: Allen ultimately feels like a facsimile of countless other films, beholden to, rather than liberated from, formula.

Allen begins in a child’s bedroom, crammed with toys and pop culture ephemera from the 90s: Ninja Turtles figures, a HeroQuest board game, a Magic Eye book. Co-directors Daley Pearson and Jeffrey Walker clobber us on the head with the message that this is the 1990s, kicking off what is a relentlessly unsubtle, if pleasantly toned experience.

Petey (played as a child by Edward A O’Sullivan) spots strange lights in the Queensland skies and meets an adorable ET. They hit it off – laughing, listening to CDs and doodling on an Etch A Sketch that Allen (as he’s soon named) can operate using his mind. “We’re gonna stay together forever, right?” Petey asks his new extraterrestrial pal. If the emotional signposting wasn’t already clear, he adds: “You’re like the best friend I’ve ever had.” Then, in case we missed it the first two times: “Together forever, remember?”

And yes, yes, we do remember – because this all transpired so memorably in ET: The Extra-Terrestrial. Everyone watching knows Allen will return home and leave Petey behind. This is where the story might usually end, making a point about the exquisite, transitory nature of formative experiences and how they leave their mark – here as a circular scar Allen creates on Petey’s hand.

Instead, the narrative jumps forward to Petey as an adult (TJ Powers) who desperately longs to see Allen again. He lives with his older brother Jaden (Josh Helman) and Jaden’s pregnant wife, Carly (Charlotte Nicado); both met Allen too but have moved on, and implore Petey to do the same. Of course Allen does return, and his first words again show the screenwriters (Pearson and Sophie Miller) spelling out the obvious: “Allen came back!”

Petey and Allen hang out again and get along like a house on fire. But a dramatic event is needed to kick the plot along, which comes in the form of Allen’s reason for coming back. No spoilers here, but the reveal is fun for a little while, though it’s a plot device that has been deployed so many times in so many films it only reinforces the sense that this story has been stamped out by cookie cutter.

One big problem is that Allen doesn’t have much of a personality. He is an archetypal cute alien pal: an amalgamation of characteristics rather than an individual with distinctive quirks. After a while his constant moon-eyed expression and gentle exclamation of “Aahhhhh!” started to give me the irrits. The film also has a lousy villain: local police chief Rory (Benedict Hardie), who feels airlifted in from central casting to play “bad guy”.

Allen establishes a retro, Amblin-esque tone, though the directors can’t help but zhoosh its palette up with big, bright, juicy colours (for a better example of a gentler, Amblin-esque aesthetic, consult the recent The End of Oak Street). Everything looks glossy, almost synthetic. That manufactured quality applies to the script too, spelling out every emotional message right to the end with cloying dialogue such as, “Sometimes even best friends have to say goodbye.” Then, in case we missed that emotional signposting, another variation of the same line (“it’s when you love someone but you let them go”) and one more to really hammer it home (“it’s part of growing up”).

A goodbye is inevitable, but by the time this happens, Allen has explained the emotional significance of the moment so thoroughly there’s little left for us to feel. It is a good-natured family film, but it lays it on too thick.