Review of Alien Trespass (2009) by Jonathan D — 11 Oct 2009

You Can Tell It's the Alien--No Pipe.

You know, you wouldn't expect this movie to share a plot hole with something famous and big budget, but it does. Famously, it turns out in M. Knight Shyamalan's [i]Signs[/i] that the aliens cannot abide water. This makes no sense on any number of levels, but the most important is that they have, against all the odds, decided to attack a planet where nearly three quarters of the surface is covered in deadly poison. Similarly, the monster here cannot abide salt, yet it eats humans, not known to lack salt--including several who have been eating popcorn and literally have salt smeared on their skin. Okay, not much, but it ran away from a tiny little sprinkling earlier, so how much does it need? The difference, however, is that this film rather seems to expect us to stop and question that detail, whereas my understanding (having not seen the film in question) is that Shyamalan just doesn't seem to have thought of it.

Ted Lewis (Eric McCormack) works at an observatory in the tiny town of Mojave, California (Ashcroft, British Columbia). He and his wife, Lana (Jody Thomson) are celebrating their anniversary in the middle of the Perseid meteor shower. Only one of the meteors is awful big and awful bright, and after a Code-appropriate celebration--hey, when we see him, he's got a foot on the floor!--he sneaks out in the middle of the night to go inspect things. He discovers an alien craft. As he approaches it, he's sucked inside. His body becomes possessed by Urp, an alien marshal trying to retrieve his prisoner, the Ghota (Jovan Nenadic), an enormous unicellular organism which, if allowed to divide, will eventually consume all organic life on Earth. But, you know, salt. The Ghota also failed to take into account local teenagers Dick (Andrew Brooks), Penny (Sarah Smyth), and wacky beatnik Cody (Aaron Brooks), not to mention feisty waitress Tammy (Jenni Baird), or even surly old about-to-retire police chief Dawson (Dan Lauria), though pretty much all the rest of the cops are useless.

So yeah. If this sounds as though it should have puppets in the corner, hey, it feels as though it should, too. And that's the point. I'm not sure if it's parody or loving recreation--it's so hard to avoid self-parody even if you're trying, when you're doing this kind of thing. However, I think the truth falls somewhere in between regardless. I won't say there are no surprises to this movie; I can name you at least one, though of course it would give away the ending. The cast is all there, though. Creepy old man? Check. Kooky kid? Check. Cop you really hope gets killed by the monster? Check and check! You just know that the kids are going to figure out what's going on before the cops, and they're just going to have to do something about it, man! Late in the film, they end up in the movie theatre, and the kids are making out in the back, the very thing which would be happening in a theatre where this was playing, had it been made when it's set.

It's interesting, really. The film makes liberal use of the studio and the matte painting. It's made the way a movie from its ostensible era would be made. There's even a little intro thing which suggests that this is a lost film, made and shelved fifty years ago. Obviously, it's hard to believe that of a film starring Will from [i]Will & Grace[/i] and the Aw-Man-It's-Not-Mulder/other Terminator. Also Kevin's dad from [i]The Wonder Years[/i]. All things considered, the illusion doesn't always succeed. By and large, though, you can get into it. You can see that the people who made this watched a lot of movies of the genre they're imitating, and you can see that they worked to duplicate the look. Some of it's a little more suggestive than you'd really get in the earlier films--it is very, very obvious what Ted's "other" anniversary gift is going to be, and it's pretty clear what Dick and Penny are not doing at the beginning of the film. We also learn a little too much about the state of Urp's understanding of human sexuality. Still.

The ending is a little differently resolved than a movie I'd've seen with puppets in the corner, actually. There's more intelligence behind it. Sure, they're throwing around scientific terms around as if they didn't actually mean anything a few times--the creature is so obviously multicellular it's hard to know where to begin--but there's still the idea that the alien and the human can't interbreed, for example. Yeah, I wonder what happens to the victims' clothes--I guess they're considered organic enough to eat, as guns and badges don't seem to be consumed. And, after all, it is the '50s, before half the clothing out there contained plastic. But again, maybe the filmmakers just didn't think of it, either--or maybe it's a gap left intentionally to suggest the kind of gap in a movie of the era. I like that the movie's vague that way. I like that it's really working on the feel of its predecessors. It's not a bad little film. Even though it's almost trying to be.