Alien Nation (film)
Alien Nation is a 1988 science fiction movie written by Rockne S. O'Bannon and directed by Graham Baker. It stars James Caan, Mandy Patinkin, Terence Stamp, and Kevyn Major Howard.
The following year,
the movie's plot concept was used as the basis for a weekly television series
of the same name, which premiered in 1989 and ran for a single season. Hugely
popular at the time of its cancellation, a comic book series and book series were
started when it looked like it might never return to television. Finally in 1994,
the first of five television movies was produced as a continuation of the series.
The movie is set in 1991, three years after a flying saucer bearing enslaved aliens (the "Newcomers") has crash-landed in the Mojave Desert. Los Angeles becomes a new home for the aliens, who take, or in some cases are assigned, sometimes comical human names (such as "Rudyard Kipling"). Caan plays Los Angeles police detective Matthew Sykes, who loses his partner when they try to stop two Newcomers in what appears to be a robbery of a small Newcomer-owned store. The next day Sykes' commanding officer informs his squad that they will have to work with the newly promoted Newcomer detective, Sam Francisco, played by Patinkin, and if someone doesn't volunteer to work with him the commanding officer shall choose someone. Sykes volunteers to work with Francisco, feeling that as he investigates crimes involving Newcomers he will find opportunities to also investigate his partner's death, which he is officially forbidden to do.
Sykes tells Sam that the joke name given him by an immigration official is embarrassing, and calls his partner George. In return, "George" points out that in his own language, "Sykes" sounds like the two words meaning "excrement" and "cranium" - "s######d". As the pair continue to be assigned cases which mainly deal with Newcomer criminals and victims and as the cases progress, Sykes is able to learn to appreciate his partner.
The main villain of the film is an ambitious Newcomer businessman who plans to sell a drug which was used to pacify the Newcomers when they were slaves, but which has no effect on humans.
[edit]
Analysis
The Tenctonese/Newcomers have been bred to work in a wide variety
of environments, readily adapting to different conditions. As a result, they rapidly
assimilate American culture and even become viewed by some human characters in
the film as an economic threat when they begin to very quickly advance through
the education system and workforce. The film (and the subsequent television series
even more so) is a metaphor for immigration, assimilation, suspicion of new arrivals
and caste systems.
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