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THE
ARRIVAL
6/10
USA
1996
dir
David Twohy
100 mins
An
opportunistic cash-in on then-current we are not alone / aliens among
us / eco-horror trends, The Arrival cheerfuly steals from The
X-Files, Contact, Men in Black, though its real debt
is to 1958 British picture Quatermass II, with its central idea
of aliens speeding up global warming as a precursor to full-scale invasion.
A
chubby, sweaty Charlie Sheen careers through proceedings on just the right
note of pop-eyed paranoia as geeky scientist Zane, who accidentally stumbles
across a mysterious signal while scanning the heavens for extra-terrestrial
communications. He soon pieces together what’s going on, but his attempts
to blow the whistle are, of course, hindered at every turn by his sinister
superiors, who, of course, turn out to be aliens-in-disguise themselves.
The
script has an agreeably cobbled-together air, but the resulting movie
is so rushed that the secondary characters - Zane’s girlfriend; a little
black street-kid who helps him out; a concerned ecologist - never come
into proper focus. In particular, Lindsay Crouse’s ecologist, seems to
have wandered in from another, better, picture - the film has no idea
what to do with her or, indeed, how to get rid of her once she’s served
her purpose, dithering over a ludicrously over-extended scene in which
she moves around her hotel room, unaware it’s infested by deadly scorpions.
There
are plenty more ‘what were they thinking of’ scenes, including a bizarre
non sequitur episode in which cast-iron baths fall through the
sodden floors of the hotel bathrooms, and a late-on escapade where Sheen,
having infiltrated the aliens’ subterranean lair, puts himself through
their ‘disguising’ process, emerging as a podgy Chicano with thick wig
and porn-star moustache. These amusing touches keep things moderately
watchable, but can’t hide the film’s central implausibility - if the aliens
are so powerful, who don’t they use their technology to bump Sheen off,
rather than sending a bloke with a sickle to do the job? The ending
is also a bit of a damp squib, rather feebly open-ended - though surely
with a cheap TV series, rather than a lucrative movie franchise, in mind.
by Neil
Young
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