After seeing the movie, I couldn't understand why there were so many negative reviews. I think too many people expected this movie to be the way they wanted it to be, and so were disappointed. Going in with no expectations beyond being entertained, I found it to be very good for its genre.
Judging by the first several minutes of the movie, I thought it was going to be pretty lame, but by the end of the movie, it was great. The story was fresh and mostly believable. The acting was mostly good. The one low was Pierce Brosnan's singing. The songs and the relationships will bring back many memories to those who were starting their adult lives in the 70's and 80's. Stay for a the cast having fun with a couple of good songs after the movie ends.
The movie was different than expected, but instead of being disappointed, I was pleasantly surprised. It wasn't hilarious, but was a nice, clean story with some humorous moments.
After seeing the trailers and the reviews, I was expecting more. There were a lot of people in the theater, considering that it was the second weekend showing, but I didn't hear one person laugh during the movie. There were laughs during the cartoon preceding the movie however. Perhaps this was done to get people in a good mood before the disappointing movie started. The children in the theater that were under 6 or 7 became restless and bored very early on during the main feature. The political messages that everyone talks about were definitely there. Maybe I got it wrong, but I thought that they were so far over the top that it was supposed to be satire on the anti-corporate, anti-obesity, and global warming movements. One of the things that I found very strange, and perhaps led to my view of the movie, was that the one person (Fred Willard, playing the head of the "big business" store) that was pre-waste earth was shown live action, while the people who were living on the spacecraft were over-weight cartoon characters. This was a reminder for me that the "people" on the spacecraft were not real, and made it hard to relate to them. Maybe if my expectations of the movie were more in line with reality, it wouldn't have been quite as disappointing.