"The Arrival"
Latest Reflections from the Guild
While sweeping the skies for signs of extraterrestrial transmissions, Zane Zaminsky decides to try a radical new approach. He sets the large radio antenna to 107 on the FM dial and promptly picks up a big spike from Wolf 336--a star approximately 14 light years away. He takes the transmission to Phil Gordian, his superior at NASA. Gordian is not impressed. In fact, he immediately informs Zaminsky that due to budget cut-backs he has been terminated. After Zaminsky leaves, Gordian destroys the tape. Shortly after, some men show up at the radio telescope and confiscate all the files. And shortly after that, Zaminsky's co-worker dies in a house fire. Zaminsky decides to pursue the matter further and rigs up a phased array using several home satellite dishes. He receives another transmission, this time interlaced with a regular FM signal from Mexico. Zaminsky travels to the radio station only to find it burned to the ground as well. As Zaminsky searches for the radio dish that sent the second signal, he comes upon another scientist who is investigating a rapid global warming effect localized in central Mexico. At the time, she is being accosted by some security guards from a nearby power plant. Eventually, a power plant official lets them both go. Later that evening the scientist dies as Zaminsky sneaks into the power plant. Inside, he finds an immense underground "green-house gas" generator. The alien presence already on the planet has created twenty such plants in third-world countries to change the atmosphere of the Earth and make it suitable for colonization in only ten years. Zaminsky confronts Gordian with this information. He assumes that Gordian is an alien and manages to get Gordian on video tape admitting to the plan. After a final climactic scene at the radio telescope, Zaminsky does manage to transmit the tape to a weather satellite that is constantly recorded by fifty television stations, thereby spreading the word about the aliens.
Brash Reflections
This was fun! It had some nice twists and turns in it and the creators keep you guess who was and who wasn't an alien. I enjoyed the actual look of the aliens, as well, with those wild-n-crazy knee joints. (Wasn't there another sci-fi movie that had aliens with the same backward knee thing?) And the underground plant was cool. Of course, there are always nits . . .
I guess credit cards are wonderful things. Zaminsky gets fired. Yet he manages to amass an incredible amount of equipment for his phased array, including miles of fiber optic cable (strung through the trees no doubt), a liquid hydrogen vat (if I recall correctly liquid helium is somewhere around -170 and Zaminsky's temperature gauge read in the -230 range), and a 12 or 16 track reel-to-reel audio recording deck. (Not to mention all the expenses that Zaminsky accrues in Mexico. Hate to see the minimum payment on that bill!)
One also wonders what the satellite-dish owners thought when they were watching the WWF Wrestle-O-Rama and their dishes started moving!
Okay so the aliens want to destroy Zaminsky's equipment. They bring this sphere that rotates and flashes a lot of light and sucks up everything in the room. Yet, twice earlier in the movie they used fire to accomplish their purposes. Wouldn't it have been simpler just to burn his house down?
To sneak into the power plant in Mexico, Zaminsky hitches a ride in a VW beetle. It is an old car and creaks terribly when the hood in front opens. Yet, Zaminsky somehow manages to get inside while an alien stands only a few feet away.
Supposedly this power plant has a radio antenna that is transmitting at 107 on your FM dial to a star over 14 light years away. Supposedly, the star is sending messages back. Given that an FM signal travels at the speed of light, that's one long conversation! ("Hello?", 14 years later, "Hi! Who is this?" 14 years later. "Bob." 14 years later, "Oh, hi Bob. Whatcha doin'?" 14 years later . . . )
I was a bit confused by a few of the finer points on the entire radio telescope scene at the end of the episode. First of all, the aliens cut the power to the control shack to keep Zaminsky from transmitting. Well . . . sort of. They only think to cut the power to the circuits that control the positioning of the telescope. For some reason, they don't follow through with this tactic and cut the power to everything else! Also, Zaminsky tells a boy who tags along to hit the transmit button as soon as he manually adjusts the dish. But, he says nothing about taking the video camera off pause! If you don't press the play button on the camera all you are going to transmit is a single frozen frame. And speaking of a single frozen frame, that little video camera has the absolute longest pause feature that I have ever seen! Every camera that I have ever worked with automatically goes into play mode or stops the tape altogether after a few minutes to keep the video head from wearing a hole in the tape. One final DIETS, at the end of the episode, the aliens use a larger version of the cosmic sweeper inside the building directly under the radio telescope. This thing is powerful enough to cause a vacuum so strong that the building implodes but Zaminsky manages to keep his grip inside the tube that leads to the surface of the dish. Somehow, I don't think so! There's more but I'll leave it to you, fellow members of the Guild.
Phil
Reflections from the Guild
[Note from Phil: I have not verified these but they sounded good to me!]
Orion Bawdo of Bellingham, WA: "The aliens send a boy to spy on Zane and get his trust. (I think that's
why they sent him, anyway. Was that actually a child alien or an adult?) So my question is, why didn't they just have him kill Zane? They tried to kill him at other points in the film, and the boy seemed to be in an ideal
position to do it. For that matter, why didn't he at least prevent Zane from hearing the second signal? He
had his back turned, and the alien was at the computer, so it would probably have been pretty trivial to change the frequency, or change the orientation of the dishes slightly, or *something* to prevent Zane
from figuring out what was going on. If the alien was really a child, then this sort of makes sense, as he might not know how to work computers, and they might not want him to be going around killing people... but then what would an alien child be doing on Earth in the first place?"
"I have the same complaint about the Taxi driver. The driver was an alien, Zane knew too much, so why didn't they have the driver kill Zane?"
"Was the purpose of that large alien machine underground with the EFX sphere ever explained, or did I miss something?" (Note from Phil: I think that was the green youse gas generator.)
"When the alien stepped into the transformation machine, it did more than just change how the alien looked; it also shrank the alien's thumbs and moved its knees to the human orientation. Clearly, this is not a simple
"put a mask on" machine. Yet, when Zane stepped into it, that's all it did. Shouldn't there be some pontentially nasty side effects, since it's expecting an alien and getting a human?"
"Also, it's unclear to me just how he picked up the signal coming from Earth, just because Zane's array and the transmitting dish were pointing to the same star. Doesn't a dish receiver have to be pointing to the source
of a transmission to be able to receive it?"
John Latchem: "I'd have to say that the best thing about seeing this movie was the preview for 'Independence Day.'" (Note from Phil: I sure hope ID4 has a good plot. All this hype makes me nervous!)
"Wolf 336, huh? Anyone else thinking 'Wolf 359?'"
"Hasn't the 'you can't tell who's the alien' gotten a tad cliche? I kept thinking of John Carpenter's 'They Live.' Charlie Sheen needed some of those alien detection glasses that Roddy Piper used."
"This is yet another instance of nudist aliens. Every time aliens try to invade Earth, they almost never wear clothes unless they are impersonating humans." (Note from Phil: That's because their more advanced than us! Wink, wink. Remember, we're talking Hollywood here!)
"This kid is an alien, so why does he leave a note for his grandma? What a nice alien. Was grandma an alien too? Or was the kid impersonating another kid?"
"Is Charlie Sheen's video really that believable? I sure don't think it would convince me that aliens were everywhere. And even if everyone did believe it, why should the aliens worry. Are we supposed to believe that they have all this advanced technology and interstellar travel, decided to resort to a covert takeover of Earth,
and they didn't have the military means to back themselves up? 'Oh no! The humans are on to us! We'd better go!' And if they did have the military capability, why not just attack Earth in the first place? Why
bother with all this subterfuge?" (Note from Phil: This is a too common theme in alien invasion movie.
Those pesky aliens always have a secret weakness or they have to do their takeover undercover because if *one* human finds out, it's all over!)
"All that action on the top of the satellite dish kinda reminded me of 'Goldeneye.' Anyone else?"
"The aliens need Earth to increase its temperature 12 degrees so they can live here. These aliens can't adapt to an average temperature only TWELVE degrees lower than what they are used to? Why bother
trying to change the temperature anyways. Why don't they just settle around the equator? They seemed pretty comfortable in Mexico. In 100 years, according to the aliens, we'll have raised the temperature
ourselves, so they can just move onto the rest of the planet then. Why risk the detection when your objective is so important?"
"How did the aliens expect to explain away the collapse of the satellite dish and the disappearance of all the equipment inside?" (Note from Phil: Metal parasites?)
"The aliens screwed up the mirrors on the Hubble Telescope, eh? So why did they let the Space Shuttle go up to fix them?"
"They have to climb to the top of the dish because that van is blocking the door. Did the liquid hydrogen really damage the van that much? Why not just drive it out?"
Ryan Hunter: "The main character's next door neighbor, the black kid. If he was an alien, then why didn't he
sabotage all of the equipment in the beginning of the movie? Woulda been a lot easier. He also looked puzzled by the 'gardeners'. Wouldn't he know about his alien buddies? (I've also wondered--given that the aliens apparent didn't like the cold--why is the kid writing on the liquid hydrogen tank with his finger in the frost?)
If you would like to add some comments, drop me a note at chief@nitcentral.com. Please put the name of the movie in the Subject line and include your real name, city and state (or province and county as the case may be) in the body of the e-mail so I can give
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Copyright 1996 by Phil Farrand. All Rights Reserved.