It is time for us to analyze the science fiction/horror/action film I, Alien (2006), starring Australian martial artist Gary Daniels. This film was made during that golden age when practical effects and computer-generated effects could coexist side-by-side to create astounding imagery that would take the audience's collective breath away. In the case of I, Alien, the alien effects are all practical while the locations, helicopters, etc. are mostly computer-generated. This vibrant mix of art forms makes I, Alien one of the most satisfying action films of the 2000s.
Of course, some of your universe's critics do not appreciate I, Alien, also known as Reptilicant (which title, I must attest, might not give away the surprise ending). Reviewer Leofwine_draca writes, "The scene transitions, the direction of the actors, the editing, everything is horrible here and sinks what could have been an average production, turning it into something truly terrible." Reviewer face_of_terror concludes that everything except for the action star "is quite awful." And reviewer zoran_kamen writes, in a review that praises the film with confusing terminology, "wonder from which planet alien came, this would be really interesting topic for the gifted ones with extra psychic power !"
Read on for the truth about I, Alien...
The film opens with a spaceship flying through space and past several colorful alien worlds. Soon it passes the moon, and then reaches Earth, landing in the San Francisco Bay Area. The film then cuts to the inside of a building, where a janitor is about to feed his dog, only to be interrupted by an unseen assailant who grabs him by the shirt.
The film cuts to “One Day Later” as a helicopter flies over Alcatraz. Australian martial arts star Gary Daniels arrives on the prison island, and he is unhappy. “I cut my vacation in Hawaii short to come to this cold chunk of rock?”
The man and woman meeting him on Alcatraz explain that “we have ten corpses, one survivor…and a fortune in diamonds.”
Mr. Daniels replies, “Let’s get this over with so I can get back to my fun in the sun.”
In a green-tinged room fitted with chicken wire, Mr. Daniels interrogates a woman with dyed red hair — the one survivor. He starts by handing her his flip phone so she can have her one phone call (she has only been in the cell for eight hours), but she tosses it to the ground and it shatters. Mr. Daniels is petulant about the destruction of his plastic phone. “Great. Thanks a lot. You know how long it took me to compile the data in that thing?”
“Sorry,” she says. She has no information about the pouch of diamonds sitting on the table. However, she agrees to answer one of his questions for every question of hers that he answers. Her first question, sensibly, is whether he is an only child. He tells her he has a twin brother. She concludes, also sensibly, “That means you have good genetic makeup.” She then tells him her whole backstory: She is Dannie Miles, a fortune hunter who came to Alcatraz looking for the diamonds. The film transitions into a flashback showing her tale.
In the flashback, Dannie visits her grandfather, a man named Gramps with glasses who appears to be approximately two years older than Dannie. During the visit, Gramps tells Dannie his own backstory. “As you know, when I was a young man, back in 1953, I served hard time in Alcatraz prison, or The Rock, as we called it. It was there that we heard the legend of crazy old Jack Saunders, who was sentenced to life for murdering a jewelry courier during a jewel heist. Oh, crazy old Jack smuggled those jewels onto The Rock by swallowing them back in 1945, right after the war.”
Helpfully, the film dissolves to Gramps’s own flashback set in Alcatraz. In the flashback-within-a-flashback, Jack Saunders appears to be digging within his cell. Gramps narrates, “He had a hell of a time getting those stones out, especially one huge stone that was named after the Egyptian god Horus called the Eye of Horus. Oh, thirty carats of priceless, pure, white perfection.” Then we see Jack dying in his cell as he confides in his best friend locked in the cell next door, telling him the location of a treasure map revealing where the diamonds are hidden within Alcatraz. Returning to Dannie’s flashback, Gramps takes a hardcover book from a DVD rack and hands it to Dannie. Inside is a list of locations of the diamonds, painstakingly compiled.
Gramps tells Dannie that giving her the map is his way of giving her an inheritance.
Back at Alcatraz, Mr. Daniels continues the interrogation. He asks why there are so many dead bodies on The Rock, so she proceeds to continue her flashback. In her nice suburban living room, she recruits a group of mercenaries she happens to know, one of whom wears a laser targeting headset on his head. She then flashes to a scene that apparently is occurring simultaneously in which a Korean woman, another one of Dannie’s operatives, seduces a guard at Alcatraz, knocks him unconscious, and gains access to the communication codes on the island. Later, we see all the mercenaries take over the island. (There appear to be no prisoners locked up in the prison on Alcatraz, as this occurs in 2006, and there appear to be no tourists either, but there are armed guards everywhere and a control room monitoring everything.)
As Dannie’s flashback continues, she tells Mr. Daniels the mercenaries found a nude man’s body in the prison. But before she can explain why it is there, she tells him about what happened to the other mercenaries, one of whom, Melvin, double-crosses the rest, to nobody’s great surprise. “It means we need to find the diamonds before he does,” Dannie concludes.
The group also finds someone else on the island, a man who claims he is a janitor. One of the mercenaries, a man named Q, says, “I say we lock him up where he can’t get in the way or interfere.” However, the man suddenly attacks the others with super-strength. He falls behind an upturned table and, with a spark of electricity, he disappears.
Instead of abandoning their mission, the mercenaries split up the list of diamond locations and separate to search the prison. Two of the mercenaries examine a few cells in one of the cell blocks. “What the hell are we looking for, anyway?”
“An angel.”
“You must be kidding me. The place is full of them.” (The prison, it must be said, is not in fact full of angels.)
“Yeah, I know.”
“This place is giving me the creeps. I think I’m gonna go ahead and kill me something.”
“You and me both.”
Elsewhere, we see what appears to be a humanoid alien walking behind some bars. Apparently it exudes a smell, as Dannie says to Q, “You smell that?”
“Yeah.” He sniffs himself. “It’s not me.”
Dannie replies, “I had a pet snake that smelled like that.” She finds a glowing green slime on the bottom of her boot.
In another part of the prison, the alien appears from a cell. “You must be kidding me,” the mercenary confronting it says as he attacks it with two long knives.
Dannie and Q jump up into Alcatraz’s ceiling vents, which, fortunately for all concerned, are huge, spotless, and made of stainless steel.
After some cat-and-mouse suspense between the alien (who is revealed to be a shape-shifter) and the mercenaries, and a return to Gary Daniels interviewing Dannie in the interrogation room, the other mercenaries continue their hunt for the diamonds, though they only find pieces of Crazy Jack Saunders’s map. In a tense sequence, Melvin kidnaps Dannie in the communications room, but he himself is yanked away into the dark by the alien. The filmmakers dissolve to later in the same room, as the mercenaries, unimpressed by the alien picking them off, discuss changing their base of operations. However, instead of setting up a fortified base, they decide to separate again.
Back in the future, Mr. Daniels is joined by the other FBI agents in the interrogation room. They want to try Dannie for mass murder but Mr. Daniels wants to hear the rest of her story. “Maybe I can sell the movie rights one day.”
Humorously, one of the agents replies, “They won’t be standing in line to see that movie.”
Dannie just says, “Anyway, as I was saying, we all split up to find Melvin and the map.” The film flashes back to the corridors of Alcatraz, where a mercenary finds a dog. He bends down to pet the dog, then slowly stands up. Standing in front of him now is another mercenary, JJ, that everyone thought was dead. (Perhaps the implication is that the dog shape-shifts into JJ, but the filmmakers forgot to include this special effect.) JJ opens his eyes and we see that one is green and alien-looking.
The mercenary runs and the alien chases him to the others, who shoot at it, but it kills another mercenary by reaching through her abdomen.
In a gory shot, Dannie retrieves part of the treasure map from Melvin’s body, which has been torn in half. (She is unconcerned that Melvin is breathing shallowly and his eyes are flickering.)
The survivors—Dannie, Q, and Spry—quickly find the diamonds and decide they need to kill the alien. They reason that it must be a scout sent from another planet to evaluate Earth’s strengths and weaknesses.
“Why Earth?” Spry asks.
Q replies, “Maybe it perceives us as some sort of threat. Or maybe it sees our world as some sort of vast food supply or something.”
Spry quips, “Yeah, with us humans being the main course.” (There is no evidence the alien eats humans.)
Dannie says, “I say we kill that thing off before WE become an extinct species.” (There is no evidence the alien’s species is nearing extinction.)
Cleverly, Dannie figures out a way to make armor-piercing bullets—by opening their existing bullets and filling the shells with diamonds!
In the next scene, Spry wanders off alone and encounters the alien, who chases him back to Dannie and shape-shifts into Spry, leading to the classic choice where Dannie is forced to shoot someone who looks exactly like her friend.
Dannie shoots one of the Sprys. (Chillingly, she never explains why she chose the one on the left.) Fortunately for the humans, it turns out to be the alien. When it takes the bullet, it transforms into its reptile shape and falls to the floor. The real Spry says, “We killed you, you son of a bitch!”
“Yeah,” Dannie adds. “Time to retrieve our diamonds.”
Unfortunately for the humans, the alien is not dead. It kills Spry, beheading him, proving Dannie’s quick thinking to be all for nought. It then menaces Dannie, making the traditional alien/monster “RAWR” sound.
Q attacks the alien with what appears to be a rubber mallet, which is exactly as effective as a rubber mallet might be in such a situation, until Q brings out the big guns — which are not guns at all but swords he twirls at the alien (his swords nearly contact the lights hanging above the movie set, but such camera framing does nothing to reduce the intensity or authenticity of the scene). These are also of little effect, but Dannie and Q manage to push the alien into another room, into which they roll a grenade, finally destroying the creature in a burst of flames, during which it transforms to each of the dead mercenaries.
As Dannie and Q get up to leave, the alien suddenly bursts through the door, not dead at all.
The scene flashes forward to the interview room. Gary Daniels asks, “How did you escape?”
“How did I escape?” Dannie says. “Funny you should ask. I didn’t.”
Dannie kills the other two agents, then escapes the room after tossing Mr. Daniels into a wall. (The alien posing as Dannie’s motivations for participating in the interrogation are never explained.) Mr. Daniels is forced to run through the five or six rooms making up Alcatraz Prison to stop the alien once and for all.
Which means he takes off his shirt, then wraps it around his hands and glues the diamonds to the cloth, creating the perfect weapon.
The final 18 minutes of the film consist of a thrilling cat-and-mouse chase between Mr. Daniels and the alien during a sudden thunderstorm; most of those minutes are taken up by the two crawling through a circular storm drain. Eventually, he reaches the communication chamber, which the alien is using as a base. The two engage in an epic martial arts battle. In the end, perhaps in a nod to the original The Thing (1951), Mr. Daniels electrifies the creature somehow using the lightning from the thunderstorm.
In the film’s resolution, Mr. Daniels finds a dead (and nude) Dannie lying in an unlocked cell. He places one of the diamonds next to her, then covers her body with a transparent plastic canvas.
Cleverly, the film includes a final coda in which Mr. Daniels sits in the interrogation room answering the questions of two additional FBI agents. In order to prove his story his correct, he closes his eye, then opens it again, revealing it to be the green eye of the reptilian alien.
The End
Although Gary Daniels starred in I, Alien as a favor to a producer friend, he plays his role efficiently, sitting at a table for most of the runtime and showing off his martial arts prowess for the last 20 minutes. Of course, there is a lot of alien action throughout the film's flashbacks, which present the shape-shifter as unstoppable--it is vanquished several times before it gets right back up and kills the mercenary who vanquished it. As such, every action scene is exciting, though the filmmakers possibly telegraphed their surprise ending (in which Mr. Daniels is revealed to have been replaced by the alien) by having this happen repeatedly with the other characters. Also, as I mentioned before, titling the film I, Alien might not have been the best way to hide this surprise. Still, the film is fast-paced and exciting, with some entertaining gore and computer-generated establishing shots of Alcatraz Island. Or The Rock, as we call it.