Alien Nation (1988)

The seeds of Alien Nation started late in 1985 when producer Richard Kobritz looked for a writer for another horror project after Christine involving a killer doll for Columbia Pictures called Mechanicals.  He eventually hired Rockne S. O’Bannon, who was on hiatus from writing and story editing for eerie TV anthology shows like “Amazing Stories” and the revival of “The Twilight Zone” in the mid-80s (he’d create “Farscape” for the Sci-Fi Channel in 1999). When the Columbia project went into turnaround, the two men looked to collaborate on another project. O’Bannon already had an idea had been pitching for a new TV series. Still, he thought it could also work as a movie – a police procedural with a science fiction twist: a buddy cop action flick partnering a human and alien on patrol.

Kobritz gave O’Bannon 2.5 months to write a script on spec rather than make a studio pitch. Cop films were hot in the 1980s, so O’Bannon developed it as a cop flick primarily, with a sci-fi underpinning. It would stay grounded on Earth – no space flight, alien tech, laser blasts, or flying cars. The aliens couldn’t return to their homeworld, and, as they were slaves there, they’d have no desire to ever return. To keep costs low, the setting was the very near future, with the crash of the alien spaceship carrying the Newcomers. To make the story work, the aliens excelled at assimilation into human culture. They quickly learned to speak Earth’s languages fluently and adapted to Earth’s clothing and culture.

O’Bannon’s first script carried the title of Future Tense because it was set in the immediate future and meant to be a tense thriller. As he wrote, he had Patrick Swayze in mind for the jaded human cop and John Candy in the role of his new alien partner.

Once completed, Kobritz submitted the script to several studios. Several expressed interest, but Kobritz chose to go with Pacific Western Productions, run by his friend Gale Anne Hurd, who had a development deal with 20th Century Fox. Hurd couldn’t stop reading once started, loving the immigration allegory within a sci-fi action flick. Hurd brought it to Fox, who loved it as well, except for the title, which they couldn’t decipher and felt audiences wouldn’t either. Kobritz and O’Bannon brainstormed a title from the comparisons to In the Heat of the Night if it were an episode of “The Outer Limits” and called it Outer Heat.

Based on the strength of his popular Isuzu commercials (the “Liar” series with David Leisure as ‘Joe Isuzu’), Hurd and Kobritz selected British director Graham Baker to keep control of the production. Baker’s prior feature efforts were the third film in the Omen franchise, The Final Conflict, and the 1984 horror flick, Impulse. Baker knew he wanted to do it only six pages into his script read. He felt it was like In the Heat of the Night, but with a relationship between different planetary species that initially don’t like one another, similar to Enemy Mine.

Hurd went to The Terminator and Aliens collaborator Stan Winston for makeup duties. Winston was directing Pumpkinhead and couldn’t be directly involved, but felt his top-notch crew could handle the foam latex process to bring the aliens to life, a la Planet of the Apes. O’Bannon’s script described the aliens as all being over six feet tall, with leathery skin, early designs resembled hulking brutes to contrast their gentle personality. Still, Baker and Hurd urged for subtlety and to make them as human-like as possible, more like a different ethnicity than a frighteningly eerie species. Baker wanted audiences to recognize each actor under the prosthetics and to instantly accept the premise and the characters rather than continuously view the aliens as something that could never assimilate.

Hurd showed the screenplay to her then-husband and collaborator, James Cameron. He revised the script in October of 1987 to remove the opening narration, making the action sequences service the story. Hurd gave the revised script back to O’Bannon to make a final revision to the Cameron doctoring to polish Outer Heat into its final state. One last change asked for by Fox was, again, its title: a couple of other high-profile mismatched cop films with were set for an earlier summer 1988 release with ‘Heat’ in the title – Red Heat and Dead Heat. To avoid confusion, they opted to change the title from Outer Heat to AlienNation (no space), as a play on the word ‘alienation’), then Alien Nation.

Alien Nation is set in Los Angeles in the presumptive 1991, three years after a malfunctioning spaceship landed in the Mojave Desert containing 300,000 new immigrants to Earth. These aliens are the new ‘boat people,’ dubbed “Newcomers,” genetically engineered as slave laborers, bred to adapt and assimilate quickly to any new environment.  The Newcomers are smarter and physically stronger than their human counterparts, which makes them more suitable to perform specific jobs. The backlash against them from the human population escalates daily.

The Newcomers are different from humans in a few key ways: they are hairless, have two hearts, get drunk off of spoiled milk, eat raw meat, and seawater is like battery acid to them.

When the partner of LAPD Detective Matt Sykes gets killed by one of the “slags” (the derogatory term for the Newcomers), he makes it his mission to take down the baddies responsible.  He volunteers to be partnered with the first Newcomer promoted to a police detective, Sam Francisco, named that after he immigration officials grew mischievous trying to think of Earth names for Newcomers.  Sykes calls him “George” instead (the original script name was “George Jetson,” but Hanna-Barbera wouldn’t allow the name’s use). While they aren’t assigned the homicide case, Sykes won’t stay off of it. He employs Sam’s help to investigate the slag drug syndicate pushing a narcotic that turns even docile Newcomers into nearly unstoppable beasts.

For the lead, Baker sought James Caan, who came out of retirement looking for a well-paying role. Caan had a reputation for being feisty, but Baker stuck to his gut. Caan signed on to this formula action-thriller with a science fiction premise, after burning out in 1981 following the death of his sister to leukemia and his battle with cocaine addiction. He spent time with his young son, Scott, enjoying life away from Hollywood. The only exception being the 1987 Francis Ford Coppola film, Gardens of Stone, which failed to gain much recognition. However, he ran out of money risked losing his house, so he returned to work for Francis Ford Coppola in Gardens of Stone in 1987, a commercial failure despite Caan’s fine performance.

Caan agreed to Alien Nation to show he could open a picture, especially one his son might enjoy. He signed on without reading the script or knowing fully its story. He initially liked the director, Graham Baker, and wanted to work with Mandy Patinkin, so he said yes and prayed for the best. Once he found out what the movie was about, he considered it a b-movie formula, easy to figure out, especially when Terence Stamp enters the scene. He felt the script didn’t make sense, and Baker was no help, but he determined to go with the flow and prayed for the best.

Caan intended to play his character as a racist that would put Archie Bunker to shame, but when they hired a black actor as his first partner, and one he vowed to avenge, he realized that angle wouldn’t fly. When he voiced his displeasure, he realized that in this film, he was just an actor, trying to get through a movie that didn’t always make sense. He’d play Sykes as a narrow-minded jerk that doesn’t want to accept change until those changes out of his control become his new normal. At the very least, he is proud of the character work he did with Mandy Patinkin for the buddy cop scenes.

Patinkin spent four hours daily in the makeup chair for the prosthetic headpieces he’d wear all night. They also decided to allow more freedom for the actors in makeup, learning from the mistake of Enemy Mine, who paid for Lou Gossett Jr. to appear completely unrecognizable in his performance under a mask and thick alien accent. They should be just another race of immigrants in the U.S., slightly not human. Patinkin hated the makeup process, especially the tight bald cap that gave him headaches but committed to the part. He said that only James Caan’s sense of humor got him through the experience.

Caan had a difficult role of playing a bigot we’re supposed to find likable enough to root for. He also must have a conversion between the beginning and end that is believable, which isn’t easy to do in a 90-minute film with lots of extended action sequences.

Mandy Patinkin took the part because his agent thought it would be a good picture and great exposure, plus he wanted to work with James Caan. He also liked the anti-drug and anti-bigotry message. Patinkin spent two weeks training with the NYPD to get into the character, joining them on ride alongs and getting the feel for their weaponry at the firing range.

Alien Nation plays better as uncanny sci-fi than a straightforward actioner, although the filmmakers emphasize the latter, jettisoning the allegorical qualities for a prolonged climax that isn’t nearly as satisfying. The film is derivative of other 1980s science fiction films like Blade Runner and The Terminator, offering a strong action/chase element at its core while delivering something to think about afterward.  Hurd hired Terminator cinematographer Adam Greenburg because he specialized in location night shoots. Although O’Bannon’s script emphasized bright, sunny Los Angeles days, Hurd wanted a grittier evening take, not only because of the crime story but because she needed to work days on her concurrent project, the horror flick, Bad Dreams.

Greenburg shot with an eye toward authenticity. Although it’s a fantastical sci-fi premise, he wanted real lighting and location shooting, emphasizing the dark and gritty city streets around Los Angeles. Working with production designer Jack Collis, who collaborated with Baker on Impulse, they sought practical exteriors as well as interiors, with a small number of impractical scenes done in the studio, such as those involving stunts and work in the water.

Harsh lighting, normally a no-no for films featuring prosthetics, became the goal for Greenburg, who worked closely for weeks with Stan Winston’s makeup crew.  Shooting the actors in their head masks without seeing the seams around the eyes or necks required tinkering with the right angles and lighting so they looked natural without breaking the flow of the shot. Seven basic pieces go into the alien head appearance.

Portions of Los Angeles were dressed as Slagtown, the rundown community where the Newcomers reside. Signage, graffiti, shopfronts, and various sounds resemble immigrant communities that similarly hold sections of major cities. As it was easier and less expensive to block city streets when they are less trafficked, the bulk of the location work took place between 9 pm and 6 am, resulting in a movie mostly taking place at night.

Zoltan Elek, who won an Academy Award for the makeup work on Mask and also worked on the look for Max Headroom, came on board at Stan Winston’s suggestion, having just worked with him on The Monster Squad,  to take charge of the prosthetics for the Newcomers based on the Stan Winston Studios designs. Elek initially declined, not interested in doing any more monsters so soon, but he was assured that they were no longer interested in grotesque designs.  Winston’s designers wanted more elaborate designs, but director Baker reined in their tendencies due to the tight schedule.

Terence Stamp hated the makeup, nearly quitting mid-production due to overwhelming feelings of claustrophobia.  He claimed he wasn’t told that the makeup would take hours to apply and wear all day. To accommodate Stamp’s phobia, they got him in makeup as soon as he arrived on set and shot his scenes first so he’d be out of them sooner. When it came time for Stamp to wear the specially fitted bodysuit to play a cracked-out Harcourt for the finale, he refused, claiming his skin was in constant irritation and pain from the makeup and wouldn’t expose himself more to it. Stamp’s stunt double, Terry Jackson, performed in his stead for the finale despite having little facial resemblance.

Sykes wears a Dallas Cowboys so often (Caan’s choice – he had friends on the team), you may confuse him for Jerry Jones. The NFL billed Fox $50,000 a week into the shoot for copyright infringement. Fox paid because it was less costly to give NFL Properties the money rather than reshoot everything.

Production stills and the trailer depict excised scenes, especially from the climax. One involves the character of Rudyard Kipling attacking Sykes and getting shot by Francisco. The major re-edit meant the score of the film needed to be redone. Jerry Goldsmith’s synthy score, deemed too strange by the producers, was excised when he was unavailable in favor of a new one by Curt Sobel. That Goldsmith score, heard in the trailer and released years later on a limited-edition CD release from Varese Sarabande, contains a melody motif that he composed for Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, which he resigned from due to clashes with Oliver Stone. Goldsmith resurrected it for The Russia House.

Although Caan proved a fun collaborator on the set, he considers it a silly film and rarely cares to discuss it. However, he did enjoy working with Mandy Patinkin. Although he initially liked director Graham Baker, Caan’s reputation for feistiness emerged as they butted heads regularly. Caan believes Baker caved too quickly to studio demands, giving an interview to the Dallas Times Herald after its release saying he wasn’t crazy about the film, acknowledging lots of mistakes made, especially in the ending. He went on to say that Baker couldn’t direct traffic.

Upon release, Alien Nation debuted at #1 at the box office in early October, lingering in the top five for another month. All told, it took in about $25 million in the US off of its $16 million budget, not counting international receipts. Additional international money made it a modest success. It also won the Saturn Award for Best Sci-Fi Film of 1988.

Alien Nation is an entertaining sci-fi premise mixed with a cop thriller, offering enough interesting background information and repartee to please fans of both genres.  Underneath the narrative, there’s a commentary on immigration, especially the difficulty of assimilation into current culture, as well as the uneven class system created by bigotry and xenophobia that leaves outsiders to fend for themselves, turning to crime, drugs, and other means.  It never delves deeply into these themes, as the film plays more as a straightforward actioner. Still, future television efforts and books developed more on these themes in greater detail, making it a much stronger, more unique science fiction work that has developed its own small but fervent fan base.

Because of the many alterations, O’Bannon couldn’t bring himself to watch the film upon its initial release. He watched the film years later, finding it oddly enjoyable.  O’Bannon says that the TV series and movies came out that explored his original vision with depth, so he can’t complain about the superficiality of the theatrical film.

Although Fox suggested they make it darkly gritty, a la Mean Streets, O’Bannon wanted it to stay light and funny, laughing at the folly of bigotry rather than grimly accept it. Another disagreement that O’Bannon had was in specifying the date of the film. O’Bannon wrote the story to take place at an undetermined time starting “next February” so it could have perennial appeal. However, Fox decided to set the film definitively in 1991, including emblazoning it on the movie’s poster, which may have worked for audiences in 1988, but which makes no sense for audiences beyond that date who know that these events never happened.

Alien Nation never delves deep enough in its characters to truly make the climax as gripping as it needs to be to elevate it into a sci-fi classic.  However, the screenplay by O’Bannon does manage to rise above the b-movie delivery to make this a more intelligent and ethical story than most buddy cop thrillers around the takedown of a drug manufacturing crime lord.  It’s alien and yet, oddly familiar.

• In 1989, a television spin-off appeared for one season, produced by Kenneth Johnson (who made the “V” miniseries). Five made-for-TV films followed from 1994-97, as did novels and comic book continuations. O’Bannon wrote one of the episodes for the 2009″V” series revival.
• In 2008, Gale Anne Hurd talked about seriously considering a remake.
• In 2009, the acclaimed film District 9 captured many of the same themes of immigration and assimilation using an alien species.
• Also, in 2009, the Sci-Fi channel began developing a remake with writer Tim Minear (current “American Horror Story” writer and executive producer) with Fox 21 producing. They set it in the Pacific Northwest in the year 2020, twenty years after the alien ship lands with the Newcomers, who have multiplied to represent a population of 3.5 million, though still mostly segregated from living with the rest of humanity.
• In 2015, Fox announced a remake in the works with Iron Man‘s Art Marcum and Matt Holloway scripting. After they left, the project was handed to Jeff Nichols, a trilogy, if successful. Nichols’ said it wouldn’t be a remake but an original story he already had in mind but would use the same title. He wanted favorite actor Michael Shannon to play the lead alien. In 2019, Disney paused the production three days after acquiring 20th Century Fox. Nichols has contemplated transferring the ideas he had for the film into an unrelatedr project.
• In 2017, another film borrowed the idea in 2017’s Netflix movie, Bright.

Qwipster’s rating: B+

MPAA Rated: R for strong violence, brief nudity, drug content, and language
Running Time: 91 min.

Cast: James Caan, Mandy Patinkin, Terence Stamp, Kevyn Major Howard, Leslie Bevis, Peter Jason
Director: Graham Baker
Screenplay: Rockne S. O’Bannon