So I was surfing through the Free Movie selection from my Comcast On Demand service, and I came across a gem that I had forgotten all about -- Alien Nation. No, it’s not about Mexicans. It’s about these space people that find their way to earth and are trying to fit in. While this was pretty much a “buddy cop” movie between an earthling and one of aliens, it was interesting to see how a number of the newcomers tried to mesh with human society. This film spawned a TV series on FOX back in the late 1980s, of which I regularly watched. I don’t remember much of the television series other than the series ended on a rather sad cliffhanger. (I heard there was another movie made after the TV series, but I’m not certain.) I remember watching this show for a few years, and to have it end (if memory serves) with some humans plotting a mass extermination was kind of a bummer. There is another memory from the television show that I do remember, and that is when the human cop tells his alien partner about some of the greatest baseball squads of all time, and one of the teams he makes a reference to was a futuristic Pirates team from the mid-1990s. Wow, this really was a fictional program. But I digress.

As I watched this movie again (I also saw it years ago, but didn’t remember anything plot-wise), I was reminded of all the things about the television show that for some reason I found entertaining (and still do). The aliens giving themselves “goofy” names (the alien cop in this movie was named “Sam Francisco”), aliens getting drunk off of sour milk and their fear of salt water because it was the equivalent of acid to their touch (which begged the question why these people would settle next to the Pacific Ocean). I also liked the cross-cultural references such as this one involving the human cop, named Matthew Sykes, goofing on Sam’s name, to which Sam replies, “I'm sure it doesn't bother you at all that (your last name) sounds like "ss'ai k'ss," two words in my language which mean "excrement" and "cranium … Shithead.”

For some reason, I looked up what Roger Ebert said about this movie, and for all the crap he awards three/four stars, I was surprised he only gave this film two stars. Here’s an excerpt from his mostly negative review:

This story has been recycled so often, we can recite the dialogue right along with the characters, but we're thinking, maybe the aliens will provide a new angle. The filmmakers couldn't think of one, alas, but I'm happy to offer several: (a) The Newcomers have a secret agenda they're concealing from humans; (b) this is "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" all over again, except that the pod people are operating in plain sight this time; (c ) the race that bred the Newcomers to be slaves sends its warships to recapture them, and humans and Newcomers fight side-by-side to repel them; (d) this is a political satire on the role of minority groups in Los Angeles.

N*gga plz. One reason I liked this movie is because it didn’t deal with any of that shit, although I did notice a few references to (d), which didn’t detract from the film at all. There’s only 90 minutes to flush out a story, and if (b) or (c ) would have been used it probably would have been poorly done. Oh, and the Newcomers were concealing something; the effects of that narcotic the big bad guy in this movie was trying to move out onto the alien masses (go watch the movie if you don’t know what I’m talking about).

On a side note, when I was scanning the other available free movies I came across a SPECIAL EDITION of Dances with Wolves with more than ONE HOUR of extra footage. OK, even though this film is about the hippie Indians and how the evil white man drove them from their land and all that other shit, I still like this movie. However, do we really need an extra hour added to this film, whose theatrical version is already three hours long?