Stream It Or Skip It: ‘We Are Not Alone’ on the Roku Channel, a Comedy-Farce in Which Aliens Share Their Unflattering Perspective on Earthlings

They’re heeeee-ere in We Are Not Alone (now on Roku Channel), “they” being aliens and “heeeee-ere” being the Stupidest Place in the Galaxy, a.k.a. Earth. This British farce originally aired on Dave – yes, there’s an over-the-air U.K. TV channel simply called Dave, how positively droll – late in 2022, and now is the subject of endless ads we see every time we fire up our Roku streaming devices. It stars some Brit-comedy veterans in Vicki Pepperdine (Getting On) and Mike Wozniak (Man Down), playing humanoids from space who zoom in on a flying saucer rendered with such cosmically terrible CGI, that has to be part of the joke. So do they come in peace, or, more importantly, are they funny? Let’s find out.

WE ARE NOT ALONE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Stewart (Declan Baxter) works as a junior local somethingsomething. Does it matter? Not really, and that’s why it’s kinda just mumbled in the dialogue, all muddy but very clear in his utter unimportance as a cog in some bureaucratic machine somewhere. His best bud Robbie (Lucien Laviscount) envisions better things for Stewart, like maybe being a local mfmdkasjfkdajii instead of a junior local iuepjkfadsjp, and then Robbie is smited by an alien space orb. Sucks.

SIX WEEKS LATER. Stewart wakes up. No cell service. TV remote? Has a big sticky paper on it saying DON’T. But he does. The news: The aliens continue taking over. China has fallen. The disheveled PM basically says, I, for one, welcome our new cheap-Star Trekish humanoid overlords. Stewart goes outside, is subject to an electrical zap when he tries to start his car, and ends up walking to work at the Clitheroe Borough Council, an office that has something to do with vague governmental whatnot, surely involving emails and spreadsheets of the most diabolically soul-stultifying sort.

It’s in this very drab, generic locale that the aliens, the Gu’un (pronounced “goon”), will assume governmental takeover of the U.K. Also here we finally learn that Stewart is a junior local planning officer, which doesn’t at all help us understand what he does. But he’d rather do whatever that is than be the aliens’ consultant, which they pretty much force him to do. Sort of, anyway – they offer him large piles of paper (money) and a “recently vacated” domicile (they killed the previous occupant during their slaughterous planetary invasion) in return. He agrees, reluctantly, less so out of Earthling solidarity, or even because they killed his closest compadre, more likely because he’s always been reluctant about life in general.

The Gu’un have electric-blue hair, pancake-white skin and, well, let’s just call them interesting skulls. They’ve adopted the language, mannerisms and even the accents of the countries they’re ruling; they name themselves awkwardly because to utter their real names in their native dialect would require the use of tonal frequencies that would result in all humans within earshot to release their bowels. Stewart works for Trater (Vicki Pepperdine), the new passive-aggressive leader of Britain, renamed Territory 78; Gordan (Mike Wozniak), who’s just straight-up aggressive, and Greggs (Joe Thomas), a kind of low-key dope. Meanwhile, Stewart hits the pub he and Robbie used to frequent, and is lured by the attractive bartender Elodie (Georgia May Foote) into the sphere of a resistance group dubbed the Anti-Alien Alliance, who of course want him to spy on the Gu’un for them. Poor Stewart – he was content to just blither and diddlefart through life, but now he has to do things. What a drag.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: It feels like the slacker-is-forced-to-think-about-more-than-himself-during-an-apocalyptic-event concept wouldn’t exist without Shaun of the Dead, especially if said slacker is British.

Performance Worth Watching: Joe Thomas plays the likable-moron alien with winking understatement, and ends up being the deadpannest among this serially deadpan cast.

Memorable Dialogue: Stewart galactically understates what’s happening in the office: “There’s been a change in management.”

Sex and Skin: An obvious erection-under-the-boxers gag, but that isn’t “skin,” so this is a “none,” but only by technicality.

Our Take: In We Are Not Alone, the aliens aren’t here to take over, although that’s ostensibly the plot – they’re in search of a habitable planet on which to live, and they’ll be hostile if they have to, and they apparently felt like they had to. No, they’re here to satirize human behavior via their outsider perspective. And so they illuminate said behavior’s most ironic, illogical and counterintuitive components, e.g., disabling all combustible engines because the emissions are killing people and the planet. When they ask Stewart why humanity still uses such things, he shrugs and reflexively quips, “Free country.” We. Are. DOLTS.

And to that I say, of course we are, tell me something I don’t know. But the message isn’t the movie’s core purpose. No, it’s a joke-delivery machine, a very dense 91-minute conglomeration of bits and gags, many of which are couched within a handheld-camera workplace comedy, complete with Trater as the de facto Michael Scott, Gordan as a pseudo-Dwight Schrute, a surly IT person, etc. There are jokes about internet addiction (Stewart suggests the Gu’un turn it back on to mollify the masses), jokes about disarming nuclear warheads (if Earthlings truly want peace, why not get rid of them?), jokes about money (Stewart informs them that simply printing more cash won’t work, but can’t really explain why).

Flimsy as it is, the human arc here is Stewart being forced out of his comfort zone, and possibly being a mite bit sad that his friend is kaput. Such things remain generally unexplored because the goal here is to keep it light and goofy with one or two contemplative moments, thus maintaining the core unspoken joke, that Stewart is emotionally muted by countless blankets of MEH. Big swaths of the comedy are easy and obvious – humans tanked on high-octane alien booze, Star Wars references, social media spoofs, etc. It generally works in a steamrollered-flat, excessively droll, peculiarly British kind of way, even though it ends with an abruptness suggesting that nobody knew quite how to end it. It’s a featherweight 91 minutes that might not draw huge laughs, but it inspires a slew of bemused smiles.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Nobody’s going to evacuate their bowels with laughter, but We Are Not Alone is witty enough to warrant a watch.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.