I think, had I been of the habit of going to the movies in 1988 as I was in 2018, I would have been eagerly awaiting a chance to see the sci-fi crime thriller Alien Nation. Aliens have a colony on Earth, and one of them teams up with a human detective to solve a big time murder case? Sounds like it would be my kind of thing now, let alone when I was about 14. However, time passes and I don’t always get to see stuff right away.
Regardless, I did find it on Amazon Prime, and that’s as good a reason as any to fill a hole in my pop culture knowledge.
Set in the far distant year of 1991 (I love it when the future for a movie or TV show is my personal past), we learn that three years earlier, an alien spacecraft had come down near Los Angeles. The aliens, a genetically-bred slave race quickly dubbed Newcomers, were allowed to settle in the area and have since experienced the standard racist blowback that new immigrants arriving in the United States have been getting since the founding of the nation. One such less-than-enlightened person is Detective Matthew Sykes of the LAPD (James Caan). When his partner dies during a violent shoot-out with some Newcomer criminals carrying very high-powered rifles for a simple robbery, Sykes volunteers to take in the Department’s first Newcomer detective, Sam “George” Francisco (Mandy Patinkin) as his new partner, reasoning the Newcomer would be useful in finding clues and interviewing other Newcomers for clues.
Naturally, the two bond, become friends, and get involved in a drug scheme involving a high ranking Newcomer that is respected by the city at large and played by recognizable character actor with a distinctive voice (Terrence Stamp). Can these two find a way to expose a major crime ring in the city?
In many ways, this is a very by-the-numbers cop thriller. It just so happens a number of the characters running around are bald aliens with some weird physical quirks, like how they get drunk off sour milk, have a sensitive spot on their armpit if you want to punch one out quickly, and they dissolve in sea water. Even without the alien aspects, Sykes and George are very different people with Sykes as the slob with the ex-wife who may or may not go to his daughter’s wedding at the end of the movie and George being a devoted family man trying to get by in a strange city. The various racial allegories disappear as the movie goes along–the movie only runs 90 minutes so Sykes has to start treating George better pretty quickly and George has to learn to trust Sykes enough to tell him stuff about his own race before the movie goes too far along–and that was a shame because, given movies like Bright tread similar ground, it was somewhat unique in 1988. It also worked a bit as we saw Sykes and his first partner do nothing but talk trash about the Newcomers in a somewhat familiar manner before they stumbled upon the crime that got the partner killed.
As such, this was only a decent start to a sci-fi universe. The Newcomers were potentially interesting, but the longer the movie ran, the less interested it seemed to be in looking at these aliens as, well, aliens. That might have been the point, and this could have been a much better movie had the cop story not been so formulaic. I did enjoy this, but not enough to necessarily recommend or to track down the TV spin-off series.
Grade: C+
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