Wasted Potential

I have to sometimes wonder in awe about the hollywarped-writers' ability to take a grand, interesting, even exciting idea, and turn it into a boring, old cliché-ridden crap.

The way they can do this about _ANYTHING_, is remarkable!

The only good thing about this movie is the surprisingly small amount of misandry, almost complete lack of injected romance and annoying female characters (though I skipped most of the 'female alien' bits, because bald women are ugly as they are, let alone with liver spots! There's only so much my stomach can handle).

This is another example of a movie that IN NO WAY needed to be about 'aliens'. Heck, even if it had been more 'political', it would STILL have been a boring cliché about racism and yadda-yadda - we have all heard it before, we have all been swimming in that moralism-feces, we get it. Don't be a racist or a speciecist or whatever.

But it turns its sights even lower - it doesn't EVEN attempt to utilize its grand and other-wordly (almost literally) source material and vast idea resources in ANY way, except for a few predictable, clichéic jabs, jokes and 'quirks'. Ooh, two hearts! How exciting! ... uh.. not. So what, if they have two hearts? Why is that fact being shoved down the viewer's throat like it's the second coming of Jesus the Christ?

So much could have been done with almost any single tidbit, and nothing was. How about how the meridians, chakras and aku-points (they are NOT "nerve points", although that's the common nihilistic-materialistic, superficial "explanation" for how aku-points work) are different than in humans, creating completely different reactions? And how another of the hearts acts like our triple-warmer does, and exists completely in the etheric level only?

ANYTHING would have been more interesting than "if you want to stop these guys, you have to shoot both hearts"-premise. Urgh.

I mean, what kind of moron takes a grand idea like Extra-Terrestrial contact, and different (and hopefully at least sometimes more ADVANCED) culture, and .. turns it into a COMPLETELY PREDICTABLE, cliché cop buddy-movie, that is worse than most cop buddy-movies out there?

Can you honestly say you'd rather watch this crap than 48 hours, Lethal Weapon, Rush Hour 2 or the like?

You could replace the 'alien' concept with almost any 'typically buddy-movie' concept - a woman, a japanese, a russian (or a soviet-unionian back in the day), a philippinean (for some reason, we don't ever see much of them in movies in this kind of roles)... anything typical, and you'd have the same exact plot, very easily. The 'fear of salt water' and 'being able to breathe methane gas' details are completely irrelevant to the plot and to the grand scheme (not that there is any grand scheme, more like minuscule scheme) of things.

You could call this 'Star Wars: Lost Episode', and replace the 'alien' with Jar Jar Binks and it would be essentially the same movie (probably even better), but it wouldn't have much to do with Star Wars, now, would it?

In the same way, the naming of the movie is completely wrong. This shouldn't be called "Alien Nation", it should be called "A typical cliché-ridden buddy-cop-movie". The 'alien' there is just prop, and their 'culture' doesn't differ enough from Earth humans to be of any real substance to the plot. It doesn't matter that they are 'aliens', if all they do is act exactly like humans anyway! If their biology differs slightly, who cares?

The only way an E.T. encounter would be fruitful and interesting, is if their SOULS are more advanced than ours, and THUS their culture would be different. THEN introduce the interesting gadgets and technology (not just WEAPONS, which are only "more powerful", but not any different otherwise - where's the imagination? Why are we told that their version of Magnum 44 only has room for five bullets, because of the size of them? Couldn't they just have larger cylinders (or whatever they are called)? Why make such a big point in telling the viewer that? Is that supposed to add something of interest to the plot? I don't get it).

You could have made this movie about WISDOM, and about how barbaric the Earth humans are (and how advanced they fancy themselves - the ego of a barbarian..), or any kind of interesting tale.

But no. It's about "very human-like slave-people, whose only purpose in coming to Earth is to produce a crappy, predictable, cliché-ridden cop-buddy movie that's really non-atmospheric for an 1980s movie".

That's the point of the movie. There can be no spoilers, because there are no surprises, no twists, NOTHING that any 16-year old moviegoer couldn't predict after they know the premise, and after the first partner predictably dies (anyone, who didn't see that coming, should be institutionalized and possibly go through emergency brain surgery).

Everything follows a trodden path, a formula, that's so over-used (and was even in 1988), that I can't fathom why ANY rational human being would ever watch a movie like it again, unless they are DUPED into thinking the movie is about something other than a cop-buddy-clichés - like, an extra-terrestrial culture...

.. boy, did I fall for that one.

P.S. In a good world, ALL these buddy-cop-movies should be renamed like this:

Buddy-Cop-Movie 01: Clint and a Woman
Buddy-Cop-Movie 02: Eddie and a White Guy
Buddy-Cop-Movie 03: Mel and a Black Guy
Buddy-Cop-Movie 04: Jackie and a Black Guy
Buddy-Cop-Movie 05: White Guy and an Alien
Buddy-Cop-Movie 06: ...

.. well, you get the idea. THAT wouldn't be misleading the viewer. It would give the viewer instant TRUTH about what he is about to watch. No confusion, no expectations, just knowing that you are about to be fed a bunch of clichés, tightly packed into a formula that the plot _NEVER_ deviates from at all. The obligatory scenes with the friggin' coroner, where the coroner always seems to be eating (who thought that was a good idea? We get it, it's impossible for regular people to retain their appetite in a place filled with mutilated corpses, but coroners work there, so for them, it's normal, and somehow, this is supposed to be.. funny? Interesting? Fun? What kind of a good example does this show to children, when adults in movies speak with their mouths full anyway? Disgusting!), and the whole 'did the main boss die or not - ah, he did. No, wait, he didn't! HE JUST MUTATED INTO A MONSTER!' crap .. AARGH! I wish I had not watched that far, but I kept hoping that some _USE_ for the whole 'alien' scheme would reveal itself by the end of the movie.

It didn't.