Aliens and their wicked plans for colonizing the earth! This subject has been the theme of so many Hollywood movies so far that if there are any extra-terrestrials and they are harboring any such notions (looking at the planet-wide state of affairs, it seems highly unlikely that anyone from space would want to ever set foot here!), they would do well to watch all of them before they firm up any plans.
That said, one cannot deny of the fact that such movies do make you pause right in the middle of channel surfing to watch a scene or two. That's what I intended to do when I read the storyline of 'The Thing' on HBO yesterday night, and then stayed right till the credits rolled by at the end - mainly to find out if the evil alien won and which members of the Homos apien side survived, if at all :-)
The plot is similar to one found in a dozen or so movies in the genre - a group of scientists (for a change, there didn't seem to be any eccentric one in the lot!) digging for God-knows-what in the snowy region someplace stumble upon a spaceship buried millions of years ago. A cursory inspection shows that it is emitting a sort of distress signal when the occupant managed to get out. The team also finds this occupant buried under sheets of ice somewhere close by - dead for all intents and purposes. Since they lack the skill or expertize to make sense of it all, they call upon a group of paleontologists, who land up at the remote location in no time (wish we all had such budgets!). One arrogant member (isn't there always one?) decides to do some tissue analysis and pokes the ice-locked alien with a needle.
Just when everyone is celebrating their find and speculating about how it will change the course of science, the alien wakes up and makes a run for it. Predictably, it ends up killing a member of the expedition. The others manage to set it on fire but realize, to their horror, that the alien was in the process of consuming their colleague when they killed it. Worse, it is found that the alien cells are capable of consuming the human cells and then mimicking them. The obvious conclusion, then, is that anyone of the expedition group could be an alien. The rest of the movie is about the game of survival.
One thing that can be said about the movie is that the director has been fairly successful in maintaining the pace of the action. What that means is that there is no huge time gap between the deaths of successive members :-) He has also been successful in keeping the audience guessing as to which member is infected. I was fairly certain that the female protagonist, Kate, is going to flash an evil grin into the camera seconds before the credits roll by :-)
But at the end of the movie, I still had a couple of questions. How one alien was able to infect so many people? What happened to Kate in the end? Why no aliens came to the rescue of their mate, given that the distress signal was being beamed since eons? And how come NASA and dozen other agencies didn't detect it? :-)
That said, one cannot deny of the fact that such movies do make you pause right in the middle of channel surfing to watch a scene or two. That's what I intended to do when I read the storyline of 'The Thing' on HBO yesterday night, and then stayed right till the credits rolled by at the end - mainly to find out if the evil alien won and which members of the Homos apien side survived, if at all :-)
The plot is similar to one found in a dozen or so movies in the genre - a group of scientists (for a change, there didn't seem to be any eccentric one in the lot!) digging for God-knows-what in the snowy region someplace stumble upon a spaceship buried millions of years ago. A cursory inspection shows that it is emitting a sort of distress signal when the occupant managed to get out. The team also finds this occupant buried under sheets of ice somewhere close by - dead for all intents and purposes. Since they lack the skill or expertize to make sense of it all, they call upon a group of paleontologists, who land up at the remote location in no time (wish we all had such budgets!). One arrogant member (isn't there always one?) decides to do some tissue analysis and pokes the ice-locked alien with a needle.
Just when everyone is celebrating their find and speculating about how it will change the course of science, the alien wakes up and makes a run for it. Predictably, it ends up killing a member of the expedition. The others manage to set it on fire but realize, to their horror, that the alien was in the process of consuming their colleague when they killed it. Worse, it is found that the alien cells are capable of consuming the human cells and then mimicking them. The obvious conclusion, then, is that anyone of the expedition group could be an alien. The rest of the movie is about the game of survival.
One thing that can be said about the movie is that the director has been fairly successful in maintaining the pace of the action. What that means is that there is no huge time gap between the deaths of successive members :-) He has also been successful in keeping the audience guessing as to which member is infected. I was fairly certain that the female protagonist, Kate, is going to flash an evil grin into the camera seconds before the credits roll by :-)
But at the end of the movie, I still had a couple of questions. How one alien was able to infect so many people? What happened to Kate in the end? Why no aliens came to the rescue of their mate, given that the distress signal was being beamed since eons? And how come NASA and dozen other agencies didn't detect it? :-)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment