Alien Nation (movie review)

• Title: Alien Nation
• Year: 1988
• Rating: R
• Director: Graham Baker
• Cast: James Caan, Mandy Patinkin, Terence Stamp, Kevyn Major Howard

In a near future in which aliens live and work among us, Detective Matt Sykes investigates the death of his partner with the help of a ‘Newcomer,’ and uncovers the aliens’ biggest secret.

Rewind . . .

. . . to a time when Alien Nation just seemed so damn cool. The premise was cool — a stray slave ship containing a quarter of a million genetically engineered humanoids from who-knows-where shows up in orbit one day in 1988, and within a few years the ‘Newcomers’ are living and working among us as equal citizens. James Caan was cool as the world-weary and bigoted cop who didn’t like the alien ‘Slags’ one bit, but was willing to work with one to solve the murder of his partner. Inigo Montoya himself, Mandy Patinkin, was cool, as the slightly out-of-it Sam Francisco, the first Newcomer to reach the rank of Detective, who endures Sykes needling and proves himself a loyal ally. The gun play was cool, the bald alien stripper was cool, and the blue drug that flipped the Newcomer’s psycho switch to eleven was cool. At the age of thirteen or fourteen, Alien Nation seemed gritty, adult, and . . . well, just cool.

And I have some recollection of watching the rather inferior television version as well, quite possibly before I even saw the movie itself. But the TV show didn’t really capture what was interesting about the movie, which showed the partially assimilated Newcomers living, for the most part, on the fringes of human society. The Big Obvious Message^TM of Alien Nation, of course, is an allegory on immigration, race, and prejudice. Like many other 80’s buddy cop movies (Lethal Weapon comes to mind) Alien Nation features some strong ethno-bonding at its core, and it also retreads the familiar ground of the prejudiced jerk, a guy who really isn’t all that bad, who gains enlightenment as he comes to personally know a member of the ‘other.’ The other in this case is a genetically engineered bald alien who gets drunk on spoiled milk and can’t go near salt water (your disbelief should already be suspended by the time you learn about the salt water).

If the allegory is never really used to plumb the depths of the issue, if race and prejudice are dealt with in essentially a shallow and platitudinous way, well, so what? That’s exactly what you’d get from most films — especially action films — and Alien Nation is no exception. The premise isn’t really about anything more than making a buddy cop movie with SF decorations and, while one can lament that the potential of this idea is barely utilized at all (though, I suspect, the series got much more mileage from it), in the end it can’t really be considered a failing. The chemistry between the two leads works, the buddy-bonding aspects have an amusing charm, and the maturation of Sykes has a satisfying appeal even when seen through the lens of our own cynical age.

Fast Forward . . .

. . . twenty years and the surge in popularity of the Alien Nation franchise that resulted in a TV series spin-off and a few other properties is all but forgotten, and it’s hard to guess just how the clumsy but well-meaning allegory would go over now. Written by Rockne S. O’Bannon, who later went on to do a series I have a lot of affection for, Farscape, Alien Nation is seeded with all sorts of tantalizing details that never really result in a science fiction payoff. Indeed, the big revelation in the movie, the alien’s ’secret,’ is that, in their lives as mining slaves, they where manipulated by a drug that brought them euphoria and pain resistance. It doesn’t seem like a big deal, hardly the sort of thing that the entire species would be ashamed of (or could keep quiet about!) and, even when the further factor of an overdose of the drug causing a Newcomer’s transformation into a Super Mutant comes out, it really seems pretty minor.

So, what we really have instead is a movie where two cops — one a seasoned and bitter veteran who just lost his partner, the other a by-the-book rookie from an unfamiliar culture just learning the ropes — team up to take down a well-respected member of the community, who just so happens to be a vicious crime lord and drug dealer. The community, in this case, are aliens, and the drug is something that can enslave them more thoroughly than crack and make them more dangerous than PCP . . . but still, we’ve seen this before. That Alien Nation manages to be entertaining and endearing despite that is a testament to the other elements in the film that work so nicely together.

What I like best of all, and what appealed to me most as a kid, too, is the seedy, authentic quality of much of the film. The Newcomer presence is played straight all the way, and it’s in the details that the story gains its verisimilitude. From the Newcomer graffiti and street signs, to alien bums passed out on the street with a few crumpled cartons of milk next to them, the filmmakers succeed in creating the notion that the aliens whom we’ve supposedly welcomed into our society still occupy a space both physically and psychologically far removed from humankind — or, more to the point, mainstream America. In the end, Alien Nation doesn’t spark a revelation with its SF conceit, but maybe what it does succeed at is in fact just underlining what most of us already know.

• Nostalgia Rating: Moderate
• Rewatch Potential: Moderate
• Wilhelm Scream?: No
• Unexpected Cameo: Rafterman as an evil Newcomer, and Saul Panzer as an evil human!
• Verdict: A buddy cop movie with SF trappings that doesn’t quite do enough with its premise, but is enjoyable all the same

What I Learned: That sabot rounds can go right through an engine block, and that even when aliens get civic awards in movies it means they are the villain.

Top Marks: Sykes’ big, badass revolver, a ‘.454 CASULL.’ Not purely because it is, as stated, big and badass, but because of the way it is used. Sykes doesn’t pull it out all the time to draw our attention to it and it isn’t a constant presence in the movie. Its introduction is perfect as it’s used to create distance and the possible threat of violence between Sykes and Francisco, and to underlie Sykes’ motive of vengeance. But the best thing is that when Sykes needs it most, it doesn’t do him any good against the mutant newcomer — which ratchets up the threat level in the final encounter. (Image taken from a great online resource, yourprops.com)

If (When) It’s Remade: It has SciFi (or ShyFy, or whatever stupid name they’ve coined for themselves now) original written all over it.

Final Thoughts: One of the perennial characteristics of near future sci-fi is that, sooner than you can say ‘2001: A Space Odyssey‘ your near future becomes the distant past. Interesting how a simple date can seem tantalizing when it lies just out of reach, as did Alien Nation’s 1991 back in 1988, but inevitably it becomes just another year in a string of years in which you can barely remember what you did or what sort of person you were.

This review is part of an ongoing series entitled Movies of a Misspent Youth, that looks at all the great fantasy, science fiction, and horror films available to the generation of kids growing up in the boom years of the 1980s. For more in this series, please visit my Film & TV page.