THE ARRIVAL is a mid-budget summer of ’96 sci-fi movie written and directed by David Twohy, who already had writing credits on CRITTERS 2: THE MAIN COURSE, WARLOCK, THE FUGITIVE (no big deal), TERMINAL VELOCITY and WATERWORLD, but had only directed TIMESCAPE (1992) starring Jeff Daniels. He wrote this specifically for Charlie Sheen (GRIZZLY II: REVENGE, NEVER ON TUESDAY, DEADFALL), who plays sort of against type as Zane Zaminsky, SETI researcher. I mean, he’s 99% regular Charlie Sheen, but I think he’s trying to throw some nerd into the mix. He has horn-rimmed glasses and perfectly spiked hair like D-FENS from FALLING DOWN, but he completes the look with a precisely sculpted goatee.

This was from a period between SPECIES (1995) and CONTACT (1997) when sci-fi movies were really interested in the brave scientific heroes who sit patiently at those giant satellite dish things listening for messages from space. Just in case. TWISTER’s hot shot storm chasers would give them the Dawn Wiener treatment, but they are important in their own way, and also think they’re cool because they like to howl like wolves and they’re good at rolling their office chairs back and forth between different computers.

Zane’s investment banker girlfriend Char (Teri Polo, MYSTERY DATE) is hot for him and begging him to come home but he always stays late to listen for the aliens, blaming it on his hapless co-worker Calvin (Richard Schiff, RAPID FIRE, GHOST IN THE MACHINE). Tonight Char convinces him to hurry home and he promises right before, of course, a strange sound comes over the speakers (causing Calvin to pee all over himself).

They take their findings to their boss at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories, Phil “Gordy” Gordian (Ron Silver, SILENT RAGE, BLUE STEEL, TIMECOP), who’s not only skeptical, not only turns down Zane’s request for “dish time, serious dish time,” but lays him off. “It pains me to be losing the brightest and best, I wish there was another way, I honestly do” he says, but cutbacks, and the political environment, and etc. As in so many Ron Silver movies I thought “that would be funny if he turned out just to be a nice guy and not a Ron Silver character,” but he watches from the window as Zane leaves and then snaps his DAT tape of evidence in half. Ron Silver playing Ron Silver again.

Since Ron Silver spreads lies about Zane he can’t get another job in the field, and also he loses his girlfriend, so he does what most single men do: he becomes a satellite dish repairman and secretly builds a lab in his attic attached to his customers’ dishes to monitor for extra-terrestrialsignals. He catches a kid named Kiki (Tony T. Johnson, NORTH, THEODORE REX) – who’s staying with the old lady next door but is “just kicking it here a minute” – trying to climb in his window for some reason. Zane lets him hang out, teaches him about what he’s doing, and Kiki becomes his kid sidekick/lab assistant/person to say dialogue to.

When Zane starts hearing his alien signals mixed with one from a small Mexican radio station he travels all the way there just to see that the station has burned down. The first really exciting scene happens about 40 minutes in, when Zane is taking a bath in his dilapidated hotel, the ceiling is leaking and he jumps out in time to avoid being smashed by the tub from above that falls through onto his, then tearing through multiple floors below.

It’s random and surreal and might very well have inspired one of the craziest scenes in MARTY SUPREME, don’t you think? I think it might’ve. But Marty Supreme doesn’t chase after a weird puppeteer (Ángel de la Peña) who bends his legs backward like a grasshopper and leaps onto a building.

That was weird. Oh well. Zane goes to check out a new power plant he notices nearby, and meets UCLA geosciences professor/climatologist Ilana Green (Lindsay Crouse, HOUSE OF GAMES, THE INDIAN IN THE CUPBOARD), who’s chasing her own scientific mystery obsession related to climate change. They get arrested and they have dinner and a long talk and she makes a move on him and he actually turns her down because he’s trying to make up with Char, not because it’s a weird time because of the alien conspiracy he’s stumbled onto, which would also be a good reason.

I remembered this being a good movie, a surprising gem, which I think is what many of us thought at the time, because we all went in with a “I wonder what this thing is” attitude and it went to interesting places. But watching it now I was surprised how clunky it was and how little of it I had any memory of. It’s really not until the second half that it starts seeming worthwhile, but there’s some good weirdness, like when he’s being detained in Mexico and sees that there’s a Mexican security guard who looks exactly like Ron Silver. A good what-in-the-living-fuck moment for our hero.

Or when the other Ron Silver’s agents (Leon Rippy and Buddy Joe Hooker) put a small metal ball into his attic and it spins around and then vacuums up all of his equipment (plus an innocent bird). Those guys are creepy and disguised as landscapers, reminding me of the plumber in UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING.

It turns out my memory of both the quality and the content of THE ARRIVAL was almost entirely related to the one long sequence in the middle where Zane sneaks into the power plant and witnesses the weird alien shit going on there. There’s a THEY LIVE not-supposed-to-be-seeing-this appeal to it. They have alien bodies but machines disguise them as humans. After they spot him he uses their disguise machine to disguise himself, and it gives him a mustache. Then he’s on an elevator with an actual disguised alien who talks to him in alien language and he has to fake his way out of it.

I mean, it’s a good sequence and when it hits you out of nowhere in a previously fairly mundane movie it makes an impression and 30 years later you assume the whole movie is that good.

I wish the character and mystery were half as compelling as that one part. I guess I can see some things they’re doing that are kinda interesting, like allowing Zane to be a pretty deranged dude. He’s really weird about his girlfriend. After his firing he asks her what she sees in him, and she tells gives him a list of things, then asks “Why do we always have to analyze everything? Can’t you trust that I love you?”

“Algorithms I trust. Boolean logic I trust,” he says. “Beautiful women, they just mystify me.”

Oh, jesus christ dude. Ultimately I think this stuff is supposed to make us suspicious of her, or at least explain why he is, but it’s still extremely funny when he pretty much out of the blue accuses his longtime girlfriend of being an alien operative whose complaints about him working too much were meant to steer him away from his important path. And he seems to consider stabbing her with a giant screwdriver! He quickly finds out he was way off base, but we don’t see him apologize. She shoulda left his ass to the aliens.

You know who actually is an alien (SPOILER)? Kiki. So that’s kinda interesting in retrospect too. There is definitely a trope of having one cartoonish character like this who adds a white idea of Blackness into a movie, and it’s supposed to be funny if the white guy is uncomfortable with it, or even moreso if he’s not. Can you these two? What a pair. But it’s maybe kinda subversive to reveal that the whole time he’s been an alien pretending to be human, by acting like this. And Zane believed it.

The most memorable thing about the movie to pretty much anyone is the weird sight of apparent humans suddenly having their legs bend backwards. It’s always kind of a goofy effect but happens fast and is startling. We also see full on shots of animated aliens and obviously those look a little crude. In retrospect it makes sense that these guys were created by Pacific Data Images, the company that did ANTZ. They kinda look like the antz.

(To be fair PDI did all kinds of groundbreaking work in early computer animation, including important software, the morphing in the “Black or White” video and compositing on T2.)

I remember THE ARRIVAL feeling like kind of a small, under-the-radar movie. Roger Ebert really liked it, giving it 3 1/2 out of 4 stars, and explaining that, “A lot of movies in this genre break down in the end into a simpleminded series of chases and fights. There are fights and chases in THE ARRIVAL, but they’re generated by the plot and punctuated by revelations and possibilities, so that the movie keeps on thinking and doesn’t go on automatic pilot.”

Me and my friends liked it too, and probly told other people about it, but it did not make back its modest budget in theaters. People were excited for the the gigantic INDEPENDENCE DAY to roar in and blow up every landmark in sight, so they scoffed at the type of smaller alien invasion movie that would come from Orion Pictures (their followup to ORIGINAL GANGSTAS and THE SUBSTITUTE, so that’s the kind of range they were working in). But it was at least enough of a video hit and/or name brand that two years later they released ARRIVAL II, a DTV sequel from the director of WITCHBOARD.