Det. Samuel 'George' Francisco: You humans are very curious to us. You invite us to live among you in an atmosphere of equality that we've never known before. You give us ownership of our own lives for the first time and you ask no more of us than you do of yourselves. I hope you understand how special your world is, how unique a people you humans are. Which is why it is all the more painful and confusing to us that so few of you seem capable of living up to the ideals you set for yourselves.
CAPSULE: Tired and thin attempt at genre-mixing: Aliens Are Among Us meets Crime Story. Cliches abound.
ALIEN NATION starts with one great idea and then drowns it in an ocean of stupidity. It starts off with a none-too-thinly disguised allegory about -- literally -- legal and illegal aliens. A spaceship comes to Earth, holding 100,000 roughly humanoid aliens who have been created by some other species for hard labor. They're intelligent and gifted, and they slowly get absorbed into Amercan society (I'm assuming American society, but the movie focuses on SoCal). All of this has great promise, and the first five minutes of the movie hum with untapped possibilites. Then the plot got under way, and my hopes died.
Why does this happen, almost without fail? I've seen countless movies that have the germ of a good idea but not a whit of how to deploy it properly, and I'm sad to include ALIEN NATION on that list. It's not a cheap movie; it was financed by Gale Anne Hurd, who put her money into ALIENS and a number of other movies of similar ilk. Just that somewhere along the line there was a terrible failure of imagination, and the whole thing turned into a TV cop show.
The plot features a cop -- James Caan -- and his new alien partner (Mandy Patinkin). Caan lost his last partner to an alien grocery-store robber, so of course he's hesitant. Eventually, he chokes back his revulsion and decides to use the other man to get revenge, sort of. This involves getting close to another alien, played by Terence Stamp, who simply mixes and matches all the typical Movie Drug Lord cliches. Once we were into the usual chases and shoot-outs, I lost all interest. There were attempts to get it back -- like having the aliens get stoned on sour milk, or giving them goofy names no thanks to Immigration -- but none of it elicited more than a snicker.
All the problems can be traced to the script. There's nothing wrong with the movie technically -- it looks convincing enough, especially in the opening moments. But no one took a good, hard look at it and said, this isn't enough. We've all seen enough cop shows and drug-lord revenge thrillers. Gussying yet another one up in the guise of SF doesn't help anyone.
FOOTNOTE: The strangest thing about ALIEN NATION is the TV series that was spun off from it, where they actually sat down and took the time to explore the ramifications of what they'd set up. The show's well-done and worth watching. The movie doesn't have a clue. This may be the first time the spinoff has more going for it than the source material.
