Watch this nice little Scifi film last night and it wasn't that great or that bad either. It about an alien pod that crash lands into the Antarctic and a group of scientists that discover it. The pod also emits a mathematics based signal that the lead scientist tries to decode. Sound familiar? Its basically the Thing mixed with the Contact. The movie even uses stock footage from the Thing, since the makers of this film didn't have the funding to shoot their own "finding an alien on ice"-scene. Just a warning there will be spoilers.
The protagonist of the movie is played by James Spader, who is a mathematician of sorts, sent to the remote Antarctic research station to decode the message. Not at all surprisingly he has a shady past, with SETI where he did something bad and since he is James Spader he also ruined his career by sleeping with a student. Naturally his fling is also posted on the research station.
Much of the film is spent decrypting the message the alien pod is sending, while the other half of the group tries to open the pod. Not a smart idea since the message ends up being "DO NOT OPEN", naturally the message gets to the group too late and the pod is opened, revealing the first surprise of the film. The alien, while technologically advanced, is actually benign and the only thing it really wants is to make contact with humanity. Sadly however the alien carries a deadly disease that it is immune to, but that will instantly rot nearly any living organism on Earth. I really liked this twist, I was expecting a poorly made CGI monster to pop-up and start massacring the crew, but thankfully they went for something more original.
Due to a misunderstanding the alien gets killed. The station gets a call from the US Government that promptly informs them that this incident happened once before and the procedure set for this event is the immediate incineration of the area with nuclear weapons. The group has a couple of hours to live until a Russian submarine gets into position to nuke the area. The rest of the movie is spent watching the group come to terms with their fate and preventing the two assholes, who were willing to gamble on the fate of the entire planet on the off chance of them not being sick, from escaping. The ending sort of sucked, Spader chases the one guy trying to escape to the outside of the station. Where the aliens, who were looking for their lost comrade, appear. They kill the asshole and save the remaining scientists. The Russians nuke the research station and the world is saved.
I really liked the concept of this film. The aliens were not evil, they didn't want to harm humanity, in fact they wanted to contact humanity, but they understood that humanity wouldn't survive the encounter due to the disease they were carrying. The pod being where it was, was an accident, an alien pilot who used an escape pod to survive whatever disaster his ship encountered. The threat was from a disease, which follows in the tradition of the first contacts we have had on this planet of ours. The Native Americans were wiped out by European diseases they didn't have any immunity to and we still get fun stuff like AIDS and Ebola from the jungles of Africa. This would be probably the greatest threat this planet, when we encounter an alien species. A single bacteria or virus from them could wipe out all life on this planet and one of ours could do the same for them.
The ending well at least they set up the aliens desire to make contact with humanity well in advance before they showed up at the end. It was a bit of deus ex machina, but I can live with it, but they could have played a heroic ending for the scientist who saved the planet through their sacrifice. The second thing that bugged me was that if this wasn't the first time this happened, why did the fairly simple message DO NOT OPEN sent in such a complex way. If the aliens met humans before and have been listening to our broadcasts they could have set a simple morse code message, something in the order of "DO NOT OPEN. Yes that means you Moron. Leave the alien pod alone. Just walk away. We will come and collect it."
Overall it was a decent film that provided interesting new perspectives on the "aliens of doom" and "first contact" genres.
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