“Taken” spans 50 years, starting with a World War II pilot abducted by aliens and ending with a girl who discovers that her special powers come from an otherworldly ancestor. “Taken” has a wonderful sense of atmosphere and place–it manages to be both creepy and homespun, fantastic yet familiar. If you’ve always wanted a family drama that happens to include aliens as characters, “Taken” will put you in orbit. But it doesn’t make a lot of sense. If the aliens have the power to procreate with humans, enter human minds and take human shape, why haven’t they conquered us by the first commercial?
Spielberg and company clearly want their world to be more complicated than that. These aliens aren’t always evil, and the good guys can be downright nasty–Joel Gretsch does a fabulous turn as a ruthless military man investigating a flying saucer. But the drama isn’t consistently compelling. Compared with real white-knuckle sci-fi, “Taken” is just a close encounter.
