The Arrival (film)

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The Arrival

Directed by	David Twohy
Produced by	Robert W. Cort & Ted Field
Written by	David Twohy
Starring	Charlie Sheen, Lindsay Crouse, Richard Schiff, Ron Silver & Teri Polo
Music by	Arthur Kempel
Cinematography	Hiro Narita
Editing by	Martin Hunter
Distributed by	Live Entertainment, Orion Films
Release date(s)	May 31, 1996
Running time	115 min
Country	USA
Language	English
Followed by	The Second Arrival
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The Arrival is a 1996 science fiction film directed by David Twohy and starring Charlie Sheen. Smaller parts are played by Lindsay Crouse, Richard Schiff, Ron Silver, and Teri Polo.

Sheen stars as radio astronomer Zane Zaminski who discovers evidence of intelligent alien life and quickly gets thrown into the middle of a conspiracy that turns his life upside down.

Taglines: The greatest danger facing our world has been the planet's best kept secret...until now.

For centuries we've been watching the skies, when we should have bee watching our backs.

1 Plot
2 Related Films
3 Trivia
4 External links

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Ilana Green (Lindsay Crouse) is a climatologist who discovers plants and flowers growing 90 miles from the North Pole. Zane Zaminski (Charlie Sheen) is a radio astronomer working for SETI who, along with his co-worker Calvin (Richard Schiff), discovers a radio signal that seems to have extraterrestrial origins. Zane and Calvin confirm the signal as not from a satellite or Earth. They discover that it is coming from somewhere 14 light years away.

Zane takes the tape of the signal to his boss at JPL, Phil Gordian (Ron Silver), who blows him off. Phil fires Zane supposedly because of budget cuts, and says he will give the tape to someone to check out. Zane discovers that he has been blacklisted and cannot get a job anywhere. He finally gets a job as a TV satellite dish installer, so he decides to use the satellites he installs to make his own personal array to listen to the signal again. The little boy next door, Kiki, shows interest in what Zane is doing and begins to help him with his work. He discovers that a reply signal is being transmitted from Earth back out into space. Zane tries to go to Calvin with his new information and finds out that he has been killed after giving information about their discovery to supposed government agents. Zane is becoming increasingly paranoid about what is going on. He traces the message to Mexico because the signal is receiving interference from a Mexican radio station.

Zane goes to Mexico and finds out that the radio station has just been burned to the ground. He sees Ilana, who is trying to get information on hot spots all over the world and has discovered that Mexico is the center of these global warming issues, on the side of the road getting her equipment stolen by the Mexican police. Zane stops and tries to help her, and they both end up getting arrested. When they are released, they begin to talk to each other about their respective discoveries, and they end up staying at the same hotel. An old man who has been following Zane kills Ilana by letting scorpions into her room that night after she meets Zane.

Not knowing about Ilana’s death, Zane leaves the next day to go get information on the radio signal and finds a brand new power plant. He finds out from his girlfriend, Char (Teri Polo), that a company has been building plants in third world countries all over the world. When he sneaks into the plant, he discovers that the people there are all really aliens. Deep underground they are generating greenhouse gases, which is where all the weird global warming issues Ilana has discovered are coming from. He then sees an alien who looks exactly like Phil. The aliens discover Zane and try to stop him, but he escapes only after hitting the Phil-look-alike alien with his car. He goes to police with his information and is accused of killing a man in a hit and run. The police don’t believe anything he says about the plant. While at the police station, Zane sees the dead body of Ilana, and he escapes.

He leaves Mexico and goes back to JPL to confront Phil. When the two of them are all alone outside, Zane threatens Phil and gets him to admit that the aliens are planning to kill off the human race in the next 10 years using accelerated global warming. Without their interference, it would have taken humans a long time to kill themselves off with global warming occurring at normal rates. Once the human race has been annihilated, the aliens will take over Earth. Zane pulls out a tape recorder that has been recording Phil’s confession and he also steals a security tape of it.

He then returns home to find that all of his equipment has disappeared from his house since he’s been gone. Zane, along with Char and Kiki decide to drive out to a radio station to try to broadcast the information he has found. However, he discovers that Char thinks he’s crazy and that she called the police before they left. Instead of the police, Phil and a couple of his cronies come to try to stop Zane from broadcasting the information. He soon discovers that Kiki is actually an alien when he stops helping him and gives Phil the tape. Zane figures out that the aliens cannot stand extreme cold, so he freezes them with liquid nitrogen. He then tries to pull the tape out of Phil’s frozen pocket. However, Phil is not really dead and he grabs Zane’s arm to try to stop him. Zane grabs an axe and chops his arm off. One of the spheres that the aliens used to clean out Zane’s apartment has fallen out of one of the man’s pockets and it begins to suck up everything in the building. Zane and Char escape. Kiki is still alive and Zane tells him to go tell the other aliens that they have failed, and he will tell the whole world what is going on.