THE ARRIVAL

Front cover illustration of the soundtrack CD for The Arrival (© David Twohy/Arthur Kempel/Northwest Sinfonia/Live Entertainment/Interscope Communications/Orion Pictures – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

In a June 2020 post on my Facebook timeline, I had the following to say about a movie that I had recently identified:

I saw it only once, on TV, at least 20 years ago. It was a sci-fi film all about the shattering discovery by a small group of people that unknown to the vast majority of humans here on Earth, hostile aliens had been inhabiting our planet for a very long time. There was one particular stand-out memory of it for me, which was the very last scene, when one of the discoverers, a youth [Kiki], is himself exposed as an alien and duly flees across some scrub land. And as he does so, his legs suddenly change shape, his knees bending backwards in a manner that would be impossible for normal human knees to do, rather than bending forward in the default manner of human knees.

This scene has stayed with me ever since, but until tonight I had no idea what the film was or even who was in it, but thanks to yet another search on YouTube I finally tracked it down. It was The Arrival, released in 1996, and starring Charlie Sheen as the leader of the humans who discover the awful truth about the aliens' longstanding presence on Earth.

After having identified this mystifying movie at long last, I lost no time in purchasing it on DVD, which I duly watched with great anticipation on 24 June 2020.

Bearing in mind that I remembered the second half very well but the first half not at all, I am assuming that when I saw it on TV all those years ago I must have turned it on half-way through, which would also explain why I didn't know what it was called.

Anyway, having now definitely watched it in its entirety I certainly enjoyed this tale of a hostile invasion of Earth by aliens but achieved so surreptitiously that their presence here has gone undiscovered (especially as they are able to adopt human form), even as they employ a mode of terraforming Earth to suit their environmental needs that involves raising the prevailing temperature in an accelerated form of global warming.

Happily, their skullduggery attracts the attention of a paranoid but tenacious rogue scientist named Zane Zaminsky (played by Charlie Sheen), who in spite of being betrayed by his helper, the youth, Kiki, who is actually one of the aliens, leaves no stone or radio telescope unturned in his zealous quest to unmask the alien menace in our midst.

An American-Mexican co-production that was directed and also written by David Twohy, The Arrival is certainly an engrossing, thought-provoking sci-fi film, with very realistic CGI aliens, and I am very glad to have seen it fully at last.

For anyone else intrigued by its sinister premise, here is a tantalising trailer for The Arrival on YouTube. And here is that somewhat eerie ending clip mentioned by me earlier, in which Kiki's true, alien nature is finally shown.

Cinematic still of Kiki revealed as an alien in The Arrival (© David Twohy/Live Entertainment/Interscope Communications/Orion Pictures Pictures – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

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