Some of your universe's critics fail to see the brilliance of Alien Hunter. For example, reviewer wabl summarizes the film with "Very bad acting, and a very shallow story. Not even a decent B-Movie." Reviewer adoyle444 writes, "By god does this movie suck really bad." And reviewer adnyuk dismisses the film as "Disjointed - poorly filmed - non directed junk."
Of course, these reviewers are incorrect. Read on for an accurate assessment of Alien Hunter...
The film begins in a sparsely populated area labelled by a subtitle “New Mexico, Desert 1947.” A man gets interference on his ham radio, which a radio friend of his identifies as coming from Roswell. The man decides to drive over to Roswell in his Jeep with his German Shepherd Rex. When they arrive at Roswell (which is a grassy spot in the desert), the man finds a glowing light behind a hill. Rex runs to the light, but we see only a small fire. Then the man arrives and looks up. Suddenly, he is bathed in white light. (This cryptic opening will be referenced later in a single line of dialogue, a clever example of succinct screenwriting.)
The film cuts to a research station in Antarctica in 2003, where a team sits in a control room and decides to investigate an anomaly identified by a satellite scan of the area.
Then the film cuts to the University of California, Berkeley, where young professor James Spader gives a linguistics lecture, imparting to his students that “Not all language is based on sound. We communicate in other ways that are much less overt than the spoken word. So do animals.” The difference between humans and animals, according to Professor Spader, is that animals repeat their danger calls, while humans have thousands of words used to communicate. (As he explains this, the chalkboard in front of the lecture hall is filled with mathematical formulas whose relevance to linguistics is unexplained.) He ends the lecture with the quip, “Tragically, English cows make the same sounds as French cows.”
Then, in a high-tech version of the famous classroom scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1982), Professor Spader looks at his laptop and sees an instant message from a student in the lecture hall: “I WANT YOU RIGHT NOW.”
Professor Spader, whose specialty appears to be communications, is summoned to a meeting with Professor Roy Dotrice, who just received a letter from Alexei Gierach, a geneticist. As Professor Dotrice reads the letter, the filmmakers cut to shaky documentary-like footage of a group of men in Antarctica unearthing a large object. Additionally, Dotrice (whose academic field is not specified) received a mini-CD containing the spectrogram of a radio signal that was transmitted from whatever they found under the ice. Professor Spader takes the CD to his lab and plays it on his computer, where he finds that it is “discriminate text consisting of prime numbers repeated over and over.” Professor Dotrice allows him to visit the research station near the South Pole, but he gives Professor Spader a warning: “You do anything to embarrass this institution, you’re going to spend the rest of your days teaching communication skills to the penguins down there.”
After a rough flight on a military transport plane to Antarctica, Professor Spader takes an elevator to the underground research facility where he is met by a researcher named Nyla. She leads him to Dr. Gierach, who tells him, referring to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, “Your time at SETI must have been memorable.”
“Ah yes,” replies Professor Spader, chuckling, “my lost-in-space days.”
They take the professor to the object they found under the ice, which is still shrouded in a block ice.
When the others leave, Professor Spader investigates the bottom of the ice block, which is melting profusely. He touches the ice and has a psychic flash of various unintelligible scenes. He is interrupted by Dr. Kate Brecher, a woman he used to date, so she can take him to his cramped bedroom. At night, he has another psychic flash that he interprets as a dream, this one showing the point of view of something falling from space to the Earth.
The next morning, he flirts with Nyla as she works in her corn lab; the major purpose of the underground research facility appears to be growing acres of corn and wheat hydroponically, which for unexplained reasons is best done under the Antarctic. She tells him she used to work naked due to pollen buildup and antiseptic showers, but now she is forced to work (i.e., walking among rows of corn and periodically spraying them with something) in a tight white bathing suit.
Later, Professor Spader has dinner in the mess hall, where he meets about a dozen people working at the station. He reveals he is a cryptologist who used to work deciphering signals from space for signs of alien intelligence. “Exactly how many signals have you interpreted?” asks Dr. Straub, the current love interest of Dr. Kate Brecher.
“None exactly,” Professor Spader admits. When asked if he believes there are alien intelligences, he asks his questioner, “Do you believe in God?”
“Yes,” she replies.
“Have you ever heard from Him?”
“No.”
Case, as they say, closed.
Later, Professor Spader works with the communications technician to rig up a small antenna to pick up the signal coming from the block of ice. They work on the hypothesis that the signal is actually some kind of beacon. When it finally melts, it looks like a rock, but when someone touches it they are blasted backward by an electrical charge. “The signal’s harmonics are exactly like aircraft retrieval data,” Professor Spader pronounces. “It’s a black box.” He adds, “This thing ended up here by mistake, and the signal is meant for whoever lost it.”
“Aliens,” concludes a researcher, helpfully explaining the plot (and the title) of the film.
Later, they find a crack in the rock and propose to split it open. Dr. Straub, who is skeptical that the thing is even extraterrestrial in origin, says, “I say first thing tomorrow morning, we pop this thing open. If Julian’s right, we all go down in history. If I’m right,” he continues, for unknown reasons, “we eat linguine for a week.”
Out of nowhere, the filmmakers cut to a Russian submarine patrolling near Antarctica.
The next day, they discharge all the electricity from the object, then attempt to crack it open. However, Professor Spader is in his quarters with Nyla, monitoring the signals. He explains profoundly, “You know, language isn’t just used as a means to converse, but also to define an environment so that it can survive in it. Since time and space is a constant, any intelligence within that environment will define it the same.”
Nyla adds, also profoundly, “But with a different language.”
However, their cryptographic analysis of the signal results in a striking message in English: DO NOT OPEN!
Professor Spader and Nyla run to the area where everyone else is opening the alien object. Shockingly, however, they are too late. When the object is cracked open, it causes a massive explosion that vaporizes several of the people in the base.
Fortunately, most of our protagonists survive to see the organic mass in the middle of the object, which appears to be an alien monster! Then Nyla and several others researchers suddenly get sick and fall to their knees as they all decay immediately.
In Washington, the Americans and Russians meet to implement a failsafe plan, meaning the Russian submarine will fire nuclear missiles at the research base when given a signal.
To make matters worse, the survivors decide they need to shut down power to the corn labs, killing all the corn, so the remaining humans can live.
To make matters even worse, a video monitor shows that the alien monster inside the pod has disappeared.
The survivors, of course, first turn off all the power to the station, then split up to find the alien monster. For unknown reasons, Professor Spader takes charge of everything, even though he is a newcomer to the base.
Sensibly, one of the researchers asks, “What will we do when we find it?”
Dr. Gierach replies, also sensibly but perhaps not helpfully, “The question is, what will it do with us?”
Eventually, Professor Spader encounters the alien and tells it he won’t hurt it. In a suspenseful sequence, the monster touches his head, which allows it to psychically communicate images of stars and planets to the professor.
Unfortunately, the others find Spader with the alien and immediately begin shooting at it. Just as immediately, it falls and its body disintegrates. Professor Spader can only explain, “It felt safe. And then…felt like fear.”
Fortunately, the Antarctic base receives a radio signal from Washington, where Professor Dotrice explains in great detail what is going on and why. “What you found in the ice was an escape pod, similar to our own aircraft ejection system. On the night of the second of July, 1947, a similar vehicle entered the Earth’s atmosphere. It landed near Roswell, New Mexico and started transmitting a radio signal. When they were retrieving the unopened pod, a ham radio operator named Gordon Osler stumbled on the frequency signal, the same as you did. He drove out to the source of the transmission. The aliens are carriers of the pathogen, but they themselves are immune to it. They were unaware of this until they entered our planetary system. Their first stop was Mars. Total extinction took less than six months.”
“How do they communicate?” Professor Spader asks. “Is it some form of telepathy?”
“Yes.” Then Professor Dotrice tells the survivors that a Russian submarine is coming to destroy them with a nuclear missile in three hours.
After the radio communication is ended, the survivors argue about what to do. They come up with a brilliant, original plan that involves testing the survivors’ blood samples to see if they are really resistant somehow to the pathogen released from the alien pod. Although the filmmakers do not show blood being taken, the researchers discover there is no sign of any pathogen in their blood, though there is a possibility the pathogen might be hidden in proteins somewhere. While Dr. Straub argues they are pathogen-free and it would be safe to escape the base before it is destroyed, Professor Spader argues to keep everyone inside on the chance they could spread the disease. This disagreement leads to fisticuffs, and Professor Spader is forced to reprogram the security doors so he is the only one who knows the code to get out of the base. (Again, it is unclear why Spader is in charge.)
Everything comes to a head when Dr. Straub and an accomplice stab a researcher, steal a gun, and shoot Dr. Kate Brecher, then run to a secret escape route through the hydroponic corn fields. Professor Spader chases them, but as they run through the corn they realize they are infected because all the corn suddenly begins to disintegrate.
Dr. Straub’s accomplice, the only person who can fly a plan, changes his mind about escaping and a fight ensues. Professor Spader chases Dr. Straub through a tunnel that ends in a series of ladders leading to the surface. Dr. Straub opens a door at the top and runs into the snow, followed by Professor Spader, but they are both surprised to see both a tornado and a lightning show produced by an alien UFO above them.
Dr. Straub explodes amid the alien lightning, but Professor Spader stands still and receives another psychic transmission from the aliens (i.e., he sees outer space). Then he returns to the station, where he leads the remaining survivors outside, where they meet two of the aliens. “They want us to go with them,” Professor Spader says.
So the survivors walk to the tornado and vanish into the alien ship, which flies into space seconds before the base is obliterated by the nuclear warhead. The film ends with the alien ship moving away from Earth.
As everyone who has ever seen a movie can attest, James Spader is a good actor, able to imbue his characters with depth and humanity. In Alien Hunter, he chuckles a lot, which is always the sign of an actor who truly knows his character. In fact, Mr. Spader must know his character well enough to understand whether he is a communications professor, a linguistics professor, a geneticist, or some other kind of scientist. It would be nice if he let the audience in on this secret, but such a minor detail is hardly important to one's enjoyment of such a rousing, thought-provoking film. In fact, though it might be presumptuous, I would say Alien Hunter is probably the best work of director Ron Krauss, known worldwide for his award-winning short film Puppies for Sale starring noted actor (and father of Chris Lemmon) Jack Lemmon. While I have not seen Puppies for Sale, I would wager that it does not end with the nuclear detonation of an Antarctic research base, so it clearly cannot reach the heights of Alien Hunter.