19 August 2011, 0414 EDT
I was not inclined to see this film because the trailers made it look like a dumb comedy about an annoying Jar-Jar-Binks-esque alien with a potty-mouth and some equally dumb human sidekicks.
But having been force-fed Paul by my kids, I can now attest that it’s not actually about aliens at all. Instead, it’s about nerd culture and its antinomies in Western society. (Any film that incorporates spoken Klingon is ok in my book.)
Charli Carpenter is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She is the author of 'Innocent Women and Children': Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians (Ashgate, 2006), Forgetting Children Born of War: Setting the Human Rights
Agenda in Bosnia and Beyond (Columbia, 2010), and ‘Lost’ Causes: Agenda-Setting in Global Issue Networks and the Shaping of Human Security (Cornell, 2014). Her main research interests include national security ethics, the protection of civilians, the laws of war, global agenda-setting, gender and political violence, humanitarian affairs, the role of information technology in human security, and the gap between intentions and outcomes among advocates of human security.
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