At Least There Wasn’t An Anal Probe: A Review of Alien Abduction
by June Pulliam
06/23/2005
Alien Abduction. Eric Forsberg, Director, 2005.
Eric Forsberg’s indy, straight to DVD film Alien Abduction has several interesting premises:
None of these premises is terribly original, even in the genre of films about aliens and alien abduction. Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien certainly follows the first premise, and there have been a whole slew of horror, sci/fi and fantasy films that deal with the second premise. But that’s okay. They’re still mighty good premises on which to base a story, and leave a much room for interesting and original interpretations. So this story line is one of the strengths of Alien Abduction.
Without giving away too much, here’s the plot: four friends go camping, and one of them, Jean, brings along a video camera. As Jean is fiddling around with her toy, she sees something unsettling in the sky, something that the others later cannot see when she replays her footage for them. But Jean has the last laugh, so to speak, when that evening aliens kidnap the group, bring them aboard the ship, and proceed to vivisect them. Jean later awakens in a military hospital where her attendants prod her to recount the experience and don’t seem to be willing to let her go home anytime soon, if at all. Jean escapes and searches the ship, discovering that the government is also experimenting with aliens they’ve caught.
Forsberg was influenced by the low budget indy film The Blair Witch Project, and I could certainly see that influence here—pieces of the story are related through Jean’s shaky video camera, which isn’t always in her hands, and serves as a passive (and perhaps objective) observer of what transpires. Other obvious comparisons are with Alien, not only for the plot, but for the choice of the actress who plays Jean—she has Sigourny Weaver’s body type, and the character similarly kicks ass with this impossibly thin frame.
So far, so good, right? Well, don’t run out and rent this one just yet.
Alas, this film also had way too many weaknesses. The first, and biggest in my opinion, had to do with sound quality. Frequently the volume would either become too loud, or more often, inaudible. In fact, the entire first sequence in the military mental hospital couldn’t be heard. At this point, I was fortunate if I could hear every fifth word, and desperately tried to read lips to follow the dialogue. I assume this problem was due to improperly placed boom mikes, or perhaps something not cleaned up during the editing process. Nevertheless, it is a serious flaw.
I understand that Foresberg wanted to create the sort of unfiltered realism found in The Blair Witch Project, which he admires greatly and claims was one of the influences on his film (ala Blair Witch, many pieces of the story are viewed through Jean's video camera, which is supposed to be objectively documenting with is otherwise a surreal event). But there are some illusions used to represent reality that modern viewers demand. One of them is a reasonably consistent sound quality. While in real life I can’t always hear everything perfectly, inaudibility in a fictional universe disrupts the illusion in such a way that it is all too obvious that one is viewing a representation of the real, one with technical difficulties, rather than something that perpetuates verisimilitude. This problem was very puzzling, since the quality of the opening credits was extremely professional. I would assume that a production company possessing the cash to package a product with things such as high quality opening credits would also have the resources to produce consistent sound quality.
The second problem had to do with the way the story was told visually. Alien Abduction suffers in that it doesn’t know what sort of film it wants to be: a surreal, impressionistic representation of the experience of alien abduction; a tongue-in-cheek B movie with cheesy special effects; or a simple but low budget telling of a story. So many of the scenes and characters in the asylum are similar to what I’ve seen in those high priced haunted houses that pop up every Halloween, which would be fine if the film were shot primarily in a sort of surreal mode (something similar to The Jacket). But fantastical, surreal shots were intercut quickly with scenes that were more realistic, with no rhyme or reason.
The third problem had to do with characterization. The film relied too heavily on stock characters—a sadistic, Nazi-like female base commander whose skirt is certainly not the length of a regulation uniform; a mad scientist who attends to the aliens, a Nurse Ratchet character who takes great pleasure in her sadistic treatment of patients. Usage of these sorts of characters would be fine if the film aspired to be a tongue-in-cheek B flick, but were ultimately annoying since I could see moments where the movie took itself seriously and fell away from that method of story telling.
I really wanted to like this movie, particularly since I am so frequently disgusted by the big budget Hollywood offerings, and really by the entire system of big budget films. I certainly give Foresberg, and any independent director, points for trying to buck this repressive system that so often stifles originality in the name of producing a formulaic piece of crap that will generate box office revenues with McDonalds gimmie toy tie ins. But the abovementioned flaws greatly diminished the viewing experience for me.
Still, I hope that Eric Forsberg will learn from this experience and keep making films. Indy films, particularly of the straight to DVD variety, are a type of democracy in action which gives a good many artists access to audiences, an access nearly strangled by media conglomerates who would control all we see, and this tyranny of vision is more frightening than any possibility of alien abduction.