“Two thousand million or so years ago two galaxies were colliding,” wrote E. E. “Doc” Smith as the first sentence of Triplanetary, and thus laid himself open to half a century of carping by the critics that nothing else he wrote in the rest of his six volumes of “The History of Civilization” could be anything other than anticlimactic. Presumably, “In the year 3044 A.D. the Earth blew up” leaves Don Bluth’s new animated science-fiction epic Titan A.E. open to similar complaints.

Nope. In both cases, the story goes on, reduced to the human terms that most people prefer. Smith wrote, in a rather heavy-handed way, about the people who wouldn’t even have been there without that galactic collision — Conway “Spud” Costigan and Clio Marsden, Virgil Samms, Grey Lensman Kim Kinnison and the beautiful Clarissa MacDougall, not to mention Worsel, Tregonsee and Nadreck, whom some might not even consider “people”, and their friends the Children of the Lens. In a similar way, Titan A.E. leaves destroyed Earth behind and absorbs and regurgitates all three of Robert Heinlein’s basic human plots: boy meets girl; the little tailor; and the man who changed. Add a whole bunch of computer-generated special animation effects, and you have a film that is worth spending an evening to see.

In the middle of the 31st century, earth is destroyed by the malicious and utterly alien Drej (pr. “Dredge”), for reasons never made clear (put it down to xenophobia). Some small part of humanity escapes, and fifteen years later is scattered around the galaxy in ghetto habitats or living on the suffrance of aliens. Among the latter group is Cale (voice of Matt Damon), a nineteen-year-old chopper at the Tau 14 salvage station. Here he is visited by Korso (Bill Pullman), who tries to convince Cale to come with him to help find the “Titan”, a project that Cale’s father was working on at the time the Earth was destroyed. Cale, who is no Kim Kinnison from the patriotic forties but a child of a later age, immediately asks: “What’s in it for me?” The ultimate salvation of humanity is of little interest to him. What’s in it for him turns out to be escape from a Drej hit squad that has been sent to eradicate him. From this point on, Cale travels through the galaxy with Korso and his crew: beautiful navigator/pilot Akima (Drew Barrymore), superbrain Gune (John Leguizamo), kangaroo-legged gunner Stith (Janeane Garofalo), and the utterly annoying and ultimately deadly Preed (Nathan Lane). En route we get to visit, among other places, a planet with explosive hydrogen trees, the rundown drifter habitat of New Bangkok, and the ice rings of Tigrin, where star-shaped planetoid-sized icebergs are in a state of continuous collision. En route Cale falls in love with Akima (boy meets girl), learns that he is the true last hope of mankind (the little tailor), and finds his own reasons to save humanity (the man who changed). And the energy-based Drej learn the hard way that they were totally justified, from their point of view, in attempting to annihilate mankind, but not in having botched the job…

The story is primitive and derivative, and does not require much brain-stretching to enjoy it; but enjoy it you can, and quite easily. Figuring out who the bad guys and who the good guys are may not be quite as easy as it seems at first glance, and there is a certain amount of role-switching. There are lots of nifty CGI effects. And it’s nice to try to recognize the sources of some of the scenes (watch particularly for Independence Day, The Wrath of Khan and When Worlds Collide). All in all, a fun movie.