Han Tran’s MAIKA is a surprising and very entertaining spin on the alien and child buddy movie

To the casual viewer, Maika, The Girl From Another Galaxy might appear to be a Vietnamese E.T. ripoff, with a cute little girl subbing in for the prune-skinned, glow-fingered alien botanist. But surprisingly, while director Ham Tran may have been influenced by Steven Spielberg (because what filmmaker isn’t), the source material goes back a lot earlier. Maika is adapted from the ’70s Slovakian cartoon Spadla z oblakov, itself based on the 1967 novel Spadla z nebe (She came out of the blue sky). Most, if not all of the E.T. similarities come from the original source material, which actually makes a reviewer wonder if Spielberg somehow cribbed from this eastern bloc cartoon. One that became so popular in Vietnam, after the war, that an entire generation of Maikas were named after its alien heroine, Majka.

Tran updates the story to modern-day Vietnam, and centers the Disney-ish trope of a main character who lost his mother at a young age, and whose father is a Geppetto-like tinkerer. In this day and age, that makes him primarily a smartphone repairer, though he’s also an inventor. Reeling from both the death of his mother and the recent departure of his best friend, young Hung (Lai Truong Phu) loves to play with his remote controlled plane, whose wing has been signed by his mother. But while he more than holds his own in a battle with a drone, the plane also gets him into trouble at times, both with local thugs trying to get every tenant in their building evicted, and with Vietnam’s version of Elon Musk, a local space aerospace magnate named Nghia (Huyme).

Following a meteor shower, Hung notices a mysterious purple light at the neraby lake, and goes to investigate. There, he finds Maika (Chu Diep Anh), a girl whose alien nature is immediately evident, though she learns quickly. He, of course, teaches her to fart. Nghia, of course, is on her trail.

With strong music cues, simplistic villains, extremely broad acting, and a fairly simple story, Maika might be an insufferable movie if it were made by an American studio. (There is an English dub, which I’d be afraid to watch.) What helps make it compelling is to see the same beats of something like E.T. filtered through a different culture (or two, if you count the source material). When the kids make Home Alone-style improvised weapons to fight the villains, for example, one of their schemes is to repeatedly slap people in the face with kimchi.

For some kids, the lo-fi visual effects may not prove convincing, but there’s a charm to the older-style CG, and the car chases against obvious greenscreen, that gives the whole thing a bit of an Andy Hardy and friends putting on a show vibe. It’s weird that we’re far enough along with CG that older forms of it have anything approaching a “handmade” feel, yet here we are.

It’s also fascinating to see the post-communist influences on the communist-era story (in the original novel, Maika dies). Hung’s journey is one to become selfless, as Maika is. But along the way, he makes a new best friend in the spoiled, asthmatic rich kid Beo (Tin-Tin), who supplies many wonderful toys, and of course the face-slapping portions of kimchi. The Musk-like Nghia isn’t a straight-up villain, but a misguided one, whose failing isn’t money, but selfishness with it. The only complete rotters are a local landlord and his meat-headed, Rocksteady-and-Bebop-ish thugs, and they’re largely here to get comically beaten on.

At one point, Hung’s father is offered a dream job, complete with more expensive house and schooling. He declines, because he never wants to leave the house his late wife lived in, but this is portrayed as a selfish call on his part, when the extra money would benefit his son. It’s an interestingly mixed and situational balance of philosophies, all in the service of Hung dealing with grief and being there for his magical alien pal.

Maika was made for kids, and its short-attention-span style might become taxing if 20 more movies like this came down the pipe. By itself, though, it’s a compelling look at what is and isn’t a universal trope in cinematic tales of kids helping friendly space creatures.