Alien Hunter

A movie now in DVD starring James Spader as a scholarly linguist found at the start of the movie teaching in college basic linguistics. Although the movie itself is rather basic and simple, and certainly less than a box-office success.

Set in Antarctica at a mythological US NASA Research station at the South Pole, they find a mysterious device buried in the ice wich is transmitting a powerful signal into space. They of course move the object from its buried location to the South Pole facility where the ice it is encased in melts slowly.

I won't go into details except to say that the alien is infectious, fatally so, to a certain number of the expedition, the others turn out to be carriers, all of them. The fatal nature of this infection, and the fact it is fatal to all life (demonstrated in a scene set in the artificial conditions of an acres sized green house with genetically engineered corn, where the passing of some of the infected protagonists causes the corn to wilt, turn black and die as they pass, well done by the SFX guys), they can't leave the facility. To top this of, the government controllers in the Whitehouse decide to nuke the site with a Russian submerged SSBN.

Despite questions in my mind about whether Moscow would in reality take orders for such a task from Washington, or whether they would have such an expensive piece of equipment in the Southern Ocean anyway. That is how the problem is to be solved.

The surviving people make their own arrangements to escape certain death in an interesting way, but I will leave that to you to find out.

The main part of this movie was the infection. The aliens (who ever they are) are aware they are lethal to life on Earth. Spader discovers a message encripted in the signal whic says "Do not open!", which, of course, they did.

The writers gave the aliens more intelligence than the humans, and they maybe right. Colonial occupation of the New World and the Pacific/Australasia has resulted in devastating infections which helped wipe out 80 per cent or more of the native populations, without counting the brutality of the occupiers. In our history, we have failed to teach and work successfully with the natives many times. Now it is too late, we can only opologise and respect what is left of these peoples. Maybe, at first contact, we will fare better, I hope so.