The Invader

• Canada / USA • 1997 • 93m •

• Directed by: Mark Rosman. • Starring: Sean Young, Ben Cross, Daniel Baldwin, Nick Mancuso, Lynda Boyd, Tim Henry, Ken Tremblett, Robert André, Craig Bruhnanski, Joe Maffei, Alan Franz, Howard Storey, Patrick Stevenson. • Music by: Todd Hayen.

A school teacher is impregnated and kidnapped by an alien being who has been chased across the galaxy by another alien being whose race is trying to exterminate Cross's race. When the infant is born it will be female and will become the "Eve" of her race. (Females were the first to be exterminated.) But first they must reach his ship and deliver the child (full term is three days). Mancuso cons the local sheriff in his attempt to kill the mother, child and alien.

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German Trailer

1:59

Trailer

1:10

Review:

In the real universe, each planet has its own slow evolution of life. While something like eyes might be required for any line of critter to become intelligent and certainly for any critter to become interested in space travel (if you never see stars, you'd never wonder about them), the chance of other species evolving to look like humans approaches zero. The chance of other aliens having two eyes over a nose over a mouth approaches zero. There's no guarantee of bilateral symmetry, even. The chance of inter-species breeding is zero. Hey, we can't even interbreed with chimps, who are our coevals and share 99% of DNA with us. Aliens will never ever ever come to earth to impregnate earth girls. Never. And no pregnancy, no matter its origins, could move that fast. Where is the fetus getting its mass from?

So, knowing that, a viewer understands the movie is not s-f at all, it's more a romantic fantasy. But it's an interesting romance because the alien who impregnates (which, as she points out, is really sort of rapes, though no genital contact is required) our heroine becomes eventually her friend but not her love interest; she still loves her estranged husband who is pursuing the wife he assumes to be kidnapped. Half of the movie is this not-quite-romance fantasy plot, which involves the marital separation and their childlessness and her teaching life and BFF, and half of it is a lengthy chase scene where Bad Alien pursues Good Raping Alien. (Why? We never really understand that either, and why a species would spend so much of its planetary resources to kill off another planet's intelligent inhabitants has never made any sense, but it's a sf trope no one seems to question, so there you have it. "just because.")

And you don't want to overthink the details of the chase, either, not the police procedural bits certainly, nor why handcuffs work on Alien A but not on Alien B, nor do you want to ask why Good Raping Alien and Pregnant Woman have to drive all that way to meet these advanced aliens' fleet rather than the fleet coming down wherever they damned well please, but really, don't think about any of that, and it ends up being pretty well acted by some decent actors, and pretty well paced for a girly Lifetime TV movie (which it wasn't but could have been).

And even for that sort of movie, you don't want to think too much about how the message of this film to women is "getting pregnant is the be-all of your life, and if you can't, you're not worth much, and even rape by an alien, if it cures your infertility, is better than nothing."

But ignore the biological factual errors, the logical errors, and anti-woman message, and hey, it's not that awful. It's certainly not a one-star movie or the worst movie I've seen this week.

Review by zee from the Internet Movie Database.

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May 24 2017, 08:58

The Invader - Movie Review.

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