By Travis Johnson
Jeff Nichols, director of Midnight Special, Mud, and Loving, is reportedly going to call the shots on a remake of Alien Nation, the 1988 sci-fi/buddy cop movie that saw James Caan’s grizzled detective team up with Mandy Patinkin’s soft-spoken alien cop to take down Terrence Stamp’s alien drug lord. That’s a spoiler, but the movie is 28 years old, for crying out loud.
Then again, perhaps you’ve seen it. Alien Nation was never a smash hit, but it did attract a loyal audience that saw the original film spawn a one season television series and a handful of TV movies. Gary Graham and Eric Pierpoint subbed in for Caan and Patinkin, as this was back in the day when no above-the-line movie actor would be seen dead on broadcast television (my, how things have changed). The franchise posits a world where an alien vessel carrying half a million genetically engineered slaves landed in California a few years back, and our story picks up in the middle of integration process, with Los Angeles now home to a new and very different immigrant culture. It was a bit of a blunt implement, yeah, but the movie (and the series, which had the luxury of length to explore things more deeply) dug into issues of race, prejudice, the immigrant experience, even sexuality. There’s no doubt Neill Blomkamp was familiar with Alien Nation prior to making District 9.
That sounds like fertile soil for Nichols to till, and with the current state of the world in general and the migrant crisis in particular, this is one remake we can really get behind. Can you imagine what we’d do if 500,000 undocumented refugees landed here? We’d have to turn Tasmania into an offshore detention centre. Nichols is a smart director who has shown he has some affinity for SF (Midnight Special) and he doesn’t shy away from racial politics (Loving). This one can’t come soon enough.