ALIEN RISING (2013)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological*                                                                                                                                Once again I find myself launching a mild defense of a low-budget film that's been bagged on, way out of proportion to its faults. Director Dana Schroeder and his two writers (one of whom was Michael Todd, star of ROBOT NINJA) didn't produce any sort of sci-fi sleeper. But there's a smooth progression of incidents and some half-decent fight-scenes, even if the plot doesn't always make perfect sense.                                                                                             

  So I'll unfold the plot as it's supposed to occur in the actual story, not the protagonist's fragmented discovery of it. At some past era, an alien craft with two ETs-- one small, one big--crashlands on Earth. The military prompted hides the first contact in a secret facility. Apparently the boffins' research shows that the small alien wields some sort of mental control over the big, powerful one, and the theory is advanced that the small one created the big one as a proxy with which to explore other planets. The head of the operation, Colonel Cencula (Lance Henriksen) separates the two ETs to test their level of contact, sending the big one to another laboratory. For some reason the head scientist gets the idea that they might better communicate with the alien and its "twin" with the use of a human twin that demonstrated psychic connection with her human twin. The military finds a female twin named Amy in prison, remands her, and uses her in a communication experiment. Amy dies somehow, and maybe it's the fault of Cencula-- because hey, how often does Lance Henriksen play a good guy?                                                           

   So Cencula sends his agents out to collect the other twin, whether she likes it or not. Lisa Morgan (Amy Hathaway), long estranged from her prison-bait sister, became a kick-ass homeland security agent. In a botched operation, Lisa's partner Manning (played by the sixty-something John Savage) gets killed, and because Lisa had enjoyed an affair with Manning, she quits her job. But Cencula's men abduct Lisa to their isolated facility and induct her into the government's alien-inquiry program. There, Cencula doles out just enough info to keep Lisa intrigued-- her sister's involvement, the possibility that Lisa possesses the same psychic powers as the late sister. Oh, would you believe that Cencula was far-sighted enough that he also spirited away Manning before he died, faked his death, and inducted him into the project because the colonel thought Manning would prove useful? Nah, and I didn't believe it either.                           

In fact, if anything Manning just further indicates to Lisa that Cencula's dealing from the bottom of the deck. Manning wants to get with Lisa again, but she finds love with Plummer (Brian Krause), an agent closer to her own age. (Both Krause and Hathaway were in their forties at the time RISING was made, though appearance-wise both were able to skew younger in 2013.)  Lisa also participates in the head scientist's experiments with the small alien, and I guess she provides the research guys with some extra data, though no one actually says so. But Cencula has some involved plans to make money off the ETs, and soon Lisa has to play one-woman army against the colonel, her former lover, and the troops-- though she gets some last-minute help from the Big CGI Alien.                                                                     

Director Shroeder is no Orson Welles, but he tells the formula story passably well in terms of visuals. I saw a number of critiques of Hathaway both as an actress and as a performer of movie-fights. There's not that much in the Lisa character that proves Hathaway's thespian abilities either way, but I thought she looked okay punching and kicking in the fight-scenes. I agree that sometimes the heroine would hit a full-grown man and that he'd fold too easily, and that her male opponents rarely managed to hit Lisa with a really strong blow. But those could be the fault of hasty, low-budget fight-coordination, and I've certainly seen a lot of actresses who were much less convincing as tough-girl heroines.