My Dog The Space Traveler
Directed by Robin Christian

Sometimes it can be difficult to figure out what a movie will be about until you’ve watched it, case in point My Dog The Space Traveler. That sounds exciting, doesn’t it? Like the movie is this big space adventure where a kid’s dog visits all these alien worlds, and maybe the kid has to find him and get him home! Sounds like it could be fun, and so does the description of the movie, which reads “Aliens have invaded Earth…And they want your dogs!!” Let me break it to you: this is not fun. This made me want to stop watching movies. Not just this movie. Not just dog movies. All movies.

That’s a pretty heavy statement, so I’ll explain. There is no plot to this movie. Everything we imagined the film would be about; alien worlds, aliens abducting dogs, adventure, fun, none of that happens. Especially not fun. The actual plot of the film is that a dog jumps through a portal in the backyard of a kid and then reemerges with his collar engraved with symbols.

The kid then tries to figure out what the symbols mean. That’s the plot. It is just a kid staring at a sheet of paper and saying “BUT WHAT DOES IT MEAN.” It gets old before the first scene is finished.

There is probably a question in your mind now: “How, if this movie is about a kid squinting at symbols on a sheet of paper, does it get to 100 minutes?” My Dog The Space Traveler gets to this punishingly long runtime by stuffing itself to the gills with filler. I will now list all the filler that I remember, but I might not remember it all because I have been trying to force this movie out of my memory.

We have: the kid’s neglectful alcoholic deadbeat father, his mother battling serious depression, the kid’s spy club that he has with neighbor kids, his neighbor looking for his missing cat, this girl who really wants to be the main kid’s girlfriend, bullies who exclusively hang out in the alley next to the kid’s Tae Kwon Do studio, a random middle aged man with EHS (“electrohypersenisitivity” aka “a made up disease”) who is creepily interested in this kid and the portal, a town cop who somehow learns about the ‘experiments’ that the kid is doing with the portal even though no one believes in the portal, and a sister who hates the family and wants to strike out on her own and “get a tattoo on her bosom.” Her words, not mine. 

In fact, the kid’s experiments have so little substance to them that what becomes the real ‘main plot’ is the father trying to overcome his alcoholism. We get so many scenes of the dad drinking, of him getting sent away to ‘straighten out’ only to come back unchanged, of him making some progress and being met by his wife in the most child friendly lingerie the producers could find, only for it to be revealed that he relapsed. 

Why would this be in a kids’ movie? Why would ANY of that be in a kids movie? I can only assume that they shot the twenty minutes of portal related stuff and realized that after the kid covered himself in jelly and launched himself off a pier at an interdimensional portal, that it would only make sense to abruptly switch gears and talk about how addiction destroys families.

There is a pretty awesome payoff to some of these subplots though. Sure, there’s the standard stuff like when the brother and sister reconnect and the sister beats up the bullies using her own martial arts skills that she had but were never mentioned before, but my favorite singular moment of the film was the resolution of the ‘missing cat’ subplot. We’re at the emotional climax of the film, everyone has come together to close the interdimensional portal (which is important for reasons that were not explained) and they briefly cross over into another dimension. After they get back the neighbor kid asks, “Did you see my cat over there?” And the dad explains that he actually hit the kid’s cat while he was drunk driving and it is dead. I know the point of the scene is that he is now taking responsibility and having an emotional connection but it felt so out of place to have him say, “No son, your cat’s just dead,” that I burst out laughing. Also the kid doesn’t react which makes it so much funnier.

Before I wrap this up, let’s talk about the dog who traveled through space. He does nothing. Ever. He is never the focus. The only notable thing about the dog is that I was looking at him during a scene about ¾ into the movie and noticed that he was looking straight at the camera. And then I couldn’t stop noticing this in every scene after that where this dog just can’t stop looking straight at the camera like even he can’t believe this bullshit.

I know I’ve been highlighting the goofy shit and tonally weird shit and the inappropriate shit, but let me be clear: this is not a so bad it’s good movie. This is a punishment. When I first started watching it, I made it to the first ad break, saw that I had an hour left and gave up for the night. Not since Dude, Where’s My Dog, has a movie made me take a break like that. Watch at your own risk.