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
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

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.

This film has a sequel called The Second Arrival.

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 been watching our backs.

[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 dismisses his claim. Phil fires Zane supposedly because of budget cuts, and says he will give the tape to someone to check out. He destroys the tape instead. Zane discovers that he has been blacklisted by Gordian and cannot get a job anywhere. He finally gets a job as a TV satellite dish installer. He decides to use some of 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. But he finds that Calvin has just died under mysterious circumstances (right after giving information about their discovery to supposed government agents). Zane is becoming increasingly paranoid about what is going on. He traces source of the outbound message to Mexico, where the signal appears to have been piggybacked onto a broadcast from a Mexican radio station.

Zane goes to Mexico and finds out that the radio station has just been burned to the ground. While looking for more information on the radio signal, he finds a brand new power plant nearby. He sees a woman on the side of the road having her equipment seized by the plant security guards. It is Ilana, who is investigating unusual greenhouse gas activity in that region. Zane stops and tries to help her, and they both end up getting arrested and taken into the plant for questioning. While inside, Zane sees an alien who looks exactly like Phil. When they are released, they begin to talk to each other about their respective discoveries, and they end up staying at the same hotel. Calling home, he finds out from his girlfriend, Char (Teri Polo), that the company that constructed the plant has been building similar plants in third world countries all over the world. Meanwhile, an old man who has been following Zane kills Ilana by putting scorpions into her room that night after she meets Zane.

Not knowing about Ilana’s death, Zane leaves in the middle of the night to investigate the power plant. He manages to slip into the plant undetected, and discovers that the people working there are all actually aliens. (Their knees and hips bend in the reverse direction as normal humans). They are able to temporarily reverse their lower joints and, by application of an artificial outer flesh, are able to impersonate humans in the outside world. Deep underground, they are generating greenhouse gases, which is the source of all the emissions that Ilana has discovered. The aliens are generating them, both to kill the human inhabitants, and to reverse terraform the Earth to suit their own environmental needs. The aliens discover Zane's presence and begin to pursue him. He escapes after running down the Phil look-alike alien with his car. He goes to police with his information, and finds himself accused of killing a person in a hit and run. The police don’t believe anything he says about the plant. Zane demands to see the body of the victim, as he knows that it was an alien that he hit. However when they arrive, he sees that they have brought Ilana's body instead. Sensing a larger conspiracy, Zane escapes. He manages to smuggle himself back across the border by infiltrating a Mexican rodeo troupe.

Back in the U.S., he goes to JPL and confronts Phil. When the two of them are 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 outside 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 remote control for a video camera he has hidden in a bush to capture Phil’s confession.

He then returns home to find that all of his equipment has disappeared from his house. While he was away two of Phil's henchmen, posing as gardeners, had accomplished this with a spherical device which swept every object from the Zane's makeshift satellite control room into apparent oblivion, leaving no trace behind.

Zane, along with Char and Kiki, decides to drive out to the radiotelescope facility in order to broadcast the information he has found, by tapping into a communication satellite. However, Char thinks he’s crazy and has called the police before they left. Instead of the police, Phil and several of his henchmen 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 realizes 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 Phil's arm off. Suddenly, another spherical device slips from the frozen hands of one of the alien henchmen and drops onto the floor. It activates, and begins to sweep up everything in the building. Zane and Char barely escape being eliminated by the sphere. They find Kiki still alive and waiting outside. Zane, with tape in hand, tells him to go tell the other aliens that they have failed, and he will tell the whole world what is going on. Kiki bends his knees and hips backward (into his alien configuration) and runs off into the surrounding desert.

The film ends with a television broadcast of a meteorologist commenting on temperatures over 100 °F lasting well into autumn, when it is interrupted by a bandit broadcast of Zane's recording. As the camera tracks away from the TV screen we see that it is one screen of many, apparently part of a monitoring station for all satellite broadcasts. One by one, the screens all switch to Phil's confession...