Alien Nation (1988)

(In French, On Cable TV, August 2020) The Science Fiction genre has a long history (especially in print) of using murder mystery narratives in order to illustrate a future society: it’s a great way to examine what makes a society tick, allow the detectives to meet various people and show a science-fictional device as a wrinkle in the investigation or the crime. Conversely, Hollywood has an equally long history of using science-fictional environment as mere backdrop for a thoroughly ordinary plot that could have worked just as well in contemporary settings. The difference between the two is subtle but significant: in one case, the plot enhances the genre, while in the other the plot is irrelevant to the genre. Seasoned SF fans clearly prefer the first—there’s even a dismissive expression from the Turkey City Lexicon, “Abbess phone home” to call Science Fiction that could have been anything else. Alien Nation straddles the line between the two in such a way that can often look like one or the other. One way of looking at it is that Alien Nation takes us in a decently imagined “near future” of 1988, in which a ship of aliens has landed on Earth and been assimilated in American society. They have their own language, biology and physical capabilities, and much of the film’s first half-hour is spent illustrating those changes through the early stages of a murder investigation, complicated by the pairing of the first alien policeman with an investigator (James Caan) resentful since aliens killed his partner. The metaphor for immigrant integration really isn’t subtle here, from the title onward. Still, that first half-hour is probably the most interesting thing about Alien Nation, as the aliens have their own alphabet and language, live in ghettos (with their own strip clubs), and love drinking sour milk recreationally. But then the film loses interest in taking refuge in “ordinary story labelled SF” territory: The mismatched-cop duo clearly cribs from racial integration films, and as the story advances, we’re left with a cops-against-a-monster conclusion that strips away nearly anything that had been interesting about earlier worldbuilding. (Not to mention basic questions: why would an alien species so vulnerable to saltwater choose to stay in a coastal town?) At least Caan has a decent role as the human cop, while Mandy Patinkin is unrecognizable as his alien partner. You can gauge the interest of Alien Nation’s premise and underlying concept in the long list of TV movies and novels that were produced as spinoff—the idea was so good that it couldn’t be left alone. But the film itself merely achieves a middle-of-the-road cop drama and nothing more. That’s not too bad, but it could have been better.