Movie Time : Alien Hunter

Friday night, carrying the really bad cold that would have killed 10 ordinary men (without charm, beauty, brawn & brains like me), I came back home at around 11:30 pm and watched an episode of FRIENDS. At about 12:15 this movie came on and I decided to watch it cause it has the title Alien Hunter and it stars actor James Spader, who must be a Sci-Fi fan; this is the third movie of his that features Aliens and/or Space. The other two are Stargate and Supernova. Infact, Spader's character is so similiar to that of his in the movie Stargate, where he plays a Linguist who is hired to be part of a team of soldiers who enter a gateway to a distant planet. Here he is a once herelded professor who was chided for being an "alien hunter". I must say that I am dissapointed with this movie which follows in the long line of movies that fail to deliver when aliens are involved.

Satellite imagery detects an anomalous mass six meters long by three meters wide, buried within the Antarctic ice shelf — and emitting radio signals. Crews at the Rundell Peak research station near the South Pole dig it out and bring it in. As scientists wait for the ice around the mass to melt, spectrographic analysis reveals something unexpected: The radio signals are non-random. University of California, Berkeley: Linguistics professor DR. JULIAN ROME (James Spader) is called in to the office of his boss, DR. JOHN BACHMAN (Roy Dotrice, TV's Beauty and the Beast). It's not, as Julian fears, about that long-ago trouble involving a young co-ed. It's about his days — also long past — as a decoding cryptologist with the government's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence project (SETI). Bachman tells him about the exhumed object, and that the esteemed DR. ALEXI GIERACH (the marvelous Nikolai Binev) has invited Julian to the Antarctic to help them understand what the radio signals might be trying to communicate. Not that, when he gets there, most of the staff think it's communicating anything, or that Julian is anybody. DR. MICHAEL STRAUB (John Lynch, In the Name of the Father, The Secret of Roan Inish), a chief scientist on a genetically engineered crop project, chides the beaten-down Julian as an "alien hunter." And DR. KATE BRECHER (Janine Eser, the miniseries Merlin and Alice in Wonderland) is downright hostile, for understandable reasons — she was the co-ed from Rome's past. "There's four women here," she tells him tersely. "Try not to set any records."

He wouldn't have had time to, whatever his inclination. As the encrypted message becomes clear and as nightmares become premonitions, the ice-station crew begins to realize the danger it faces, and the terror that is hidden in the code — all leading, in a complex and suspensful drama, to a global pandemic, a U.S.-Russian failsafe, human betrayal, rekindled romance and the end of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

A tussel with Dr.Straub and the rougue alien fails to ignite the screen (although they do have a great scene where the crops wilt as soon as the "infected" humans come towards them. And the four survivors leaving in the alien spaceship is so boring and predictable. Come on, people : give me a real alien movie!! I rate it 2 out of 5!



Song for the day - "Alien Nation" - THE SCORPIONS