Terraformng the planet Earth - a review of "the Arrival" (1996)

Terraforming the planet Earth

A review of the 1996 movie "the Arrival"

Seemorerocks

Over the summer holiday period I have been taking a little time out to explore some ideas.  One recommendation that I received was to watch the 1996 movie "the Arrival" featuring Charlie Sheen.  The last sci-fi movie that I could say was "my genre" was 2001:a Space Odyssey, so that says something!

I decided to track down the movie and have now watched it twice.

Zane Zaminsky  is an radio astronomer working for SETI, discovers an extraterrestrial radio signal from Wolf 336, a star 14 light years from Earth. Zane reports this to his supervisor, Phil Gordian  at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), but Gordian dismisses the claims out of hand and Zane finds himself out of a job, ostensibly beause of budget cuts. 

He takes a job as a television satellite installer, he creates his own telescope array using his customers' dishes in the neighborhood, operating it secretly from his attic with help of his young next door neighbor, Kiki. He locates the signal again but it is drowned out by a signal from Oaxaca in central Mexico.

Meanwhile Ilana Green, working at the National Center for Atmospheric Research discovers that greenhouse gasses are increasing at a rate far greater than can be explained by anthropogenic sources:

“What have we got here? Huge concentrations of trace gas in central Mexico, Ecuador, Brazil...a 700 % increase in the last five years”......  we are looking at a 12C increase over the next decade and that’s just ….catastrophic”

Zane follows the signal and travels down to Mexico to find the radio station the local radio station, from which the signal apparently originated, was burnt to the ground. After searching around town he finds a new power plant,

Meanwhile he meets, and shares notes with Ilana Green who has also turned up in Mexico to investigate the strong emissions from there and is also identifying the same power plant as Zane that seems to be the source of the emissions. 

Phil instructs some agents, posing as gardeners, to release an alien device in Zane's attic that creates a miniature black hole, consuming all of Zane's equipment. Zane leaves Ilana to again investigate the power plant and she is soon killed by scorpions planted in her room.

"Zane discovers the plant doubles as a front for an underground alien base. The very different looking aliens are able to disguise themselves with an external skin to infiltrate human society. Zane finds that all of the bases expel large amounts of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. Zane is discovered but escapes back into the nearby town and attempts to convince the local sheriff of the situation."

After being framed for the death  of Ilana by the police Zane manages to escape and get back to the United States.  He confronts Phil and gets him to admit that aliens are terraforming the earth:

Phil: As much as you think you know you don't know the half of it. You're just a little guy with a big conspiracy theory and no proof of any it....So, Zane, you take great care of what you choose to learn.

Zane: They're transforming factories, aren't they?

Phil: Yes

Zane: You're pumping out greehouse gas, you're changing the temperature, the entire ecosystem.

Phil: We're just finishing off what you started. What would have taken you 100 years we'll do in 10. Just speeding along your own demise...

If you can't tend to your own planet none of you deserve to live here.

In the fast-moving end of the movie Zane, finding all his equipment destroyed goes with his girlfriend, Char and young friend, Kiki to the satellite ground station to beam out his conversation with Phil. They find the communications have already been disabled by alien agents and they are attacked by the alien, Phil and his agents. Zane tries to get Kiki to hit the button to transmit the signal which he fails to do, so alerting him to the fact that Kiki too, is an alien.

Finally, when Phil and his agents ram the door with a van Zane freezes them with liquid nitrogen and manages to get the tape recording from Phil. Zane and Char escape through the satellite dish' base as most of the satellite dish implodes.

In the final scenes, there is a TV report on high temperatures right across North America and Zane's recording is broadcast across the globe.

"The Arrival" as metaphor

This is a film with the simultaneous themes of aliens taking over the world and abrupt climate change

The film was made in 1996, about 10 years after the first public revelations of anthropogenic climate change, many years before the advent of positive feedbacks and before methane was mentioned.

I went looking for stuff about "terrraforming" and to my surprise I found quite a lot of stuff about it.

Here, for a start here is a serious look at "terraforming" as a process to make Mars' atmosphere safer and "more sustainable" so that humans can colonise the planet.

Some stuff just can't be made up - "fact" is stranger than "fiction"

Terraforming of Mars

Terraforming of Mars is a hypothetical process of planetary engineering by which the surface and climate of Mars would be deliberately changed to make large areas of the environment hospitable to humans, thus making the colonization of Mars safer and sustainable

And in this article "terraforming" is used in this older article about - wait for it! - geoengineering!

Terraforming Earth: Geoengineering megaplan starts now

THIS is how we will hold off disaster. To help us avoid dangerous climate change, we will need to create the largest industry in history: to suck greenhouse gases out of the air on a giant scale. For the first time, we can sketch out this future industry – known as geoengineering – and identify where it would operate.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change now considers geoengineering to be respectable. The reason is simple. Unless our greenhouse gas emissions start falling soon, Earth will probably warm this century by more than 2 °C, at which point things get nasty – because human society might not be able to adapt. But emissions are still rising. The upshot is we urgently need ways to suck CO2 out of the air. This was the subject of the Oxford Conference on Negative Emission Technologies, held last month in the UK.

And here we have the "health ranger", Mike Adams of Natural News, colleague of Alex Jones, anthropogenic climate change denier saying something that dovetails nicely with the theme of the film.

TERRAFORMING has begun: “Global dimming” is a plot to EXTERMINATE humanity by terraforming the atmosphere with SMOG pollution, killing Earth’s food crops and unleashing ecological collapse

Now we come to the end game for humanity. This is it, folks: They have a plan to collapse global food production, kill off over 90% of the human race, devastate natural ecosystems and pollute the Earth’s atmosphere… and it’s all being sold to you under the banner of “environmentalism.”

The scheme is called “global dimming,” and it’s a dangerous geoengineering plot to spray billions of tons of smog into the atmosphere so that pollution levels would block sunlight and halt global warming. This is literally what the mad environmental scientists are now proposing — the very same people who have, for years, claimed that “chemtrails” are a conspiracy theory and don’t exist. Now, all of a sudden, they want to chemtrail the entire planet in order to “save” us all from global warming.

When I watched the film and heard this dialogue between Zane and the alien, Phil, I could not but think of the deep cynicism of the geoengineer, David Keith at a geoengineering conference ('evil' is the word that comes to mind)

“To raise the temperature of the planet tenfold, to change the atmosphere into one suitable for colonisation, to construct farms, cities and build an infrastructure capable of supporting thousands of colonists. Make no mistake about it, never before have we undertaken a task of this size.... after all the polar ice has been melted the atmosphere begins to grow thicker. Finally, a kind of critical mass is reached and at that point the atmosphere begins to work for us”

My first impression is to see the film as an allegory or a metaphor. The above article about "terraforming" the world with geoengineering is perhaps what is talking about. The parallels just leaped out at me!

Also, look at the cynical denial of the truth and the blackening of the names of people who are really onto something - perhaps right down to their physical elimination.

I have experienced personally how some people will use their power to tell people how and where to look while ignoring actual evidence of just how bad things are - not so far from the characters, Zane and Ilana, in the film.

I have long known that the world does not operate in the way we are all led to think it is and in recent weeks and months I have come to realise how deep this is and just how corrupt and/or corrupted our "authorities" are.

To talk about 'dark powers' or 'demonic possession' might not be entirely inappropriate in my mind.

“Aliens amongst us”

There is another sense in which this can be seen, which is a little more literal.

There has been a lot of research coming out indicating not only are we not alone in the universe but have been visited on many occasions.

Hollywood treats aliens invariably as evil beings wanting to invade the earth. In fact I have been very surprised just how widespread this genre is - look at Netfllx or elsewhere and you will find many movies made with this theme.

Most people point out that aliens are indeed walking amongst us - that they are not necessarily evil beings that want to invade us but, in fact, are motivated by humanity's actions in getting dangerously close to destroying ourselves with nuclear weapons and have intervened on numerous occasions to ensure this did not happen.

Take this documentary shown in Russia on "men in black" that was referenced by none other than Russian PM, Dmitry Medvedev (he was president at the time). He did not realise the mike was switched on apparently.

Hear Medvedev in his own words

The sixth man on the Moon, astronaut Edgar Mitchell  says that we have been visited by aliens.

He does not show too many signs of delusion or insanity.

CONCLUSION

There are many ways in which one could take this movie other than "it is a good flic".   The dual theme of abrupt climate change and aliens terraforming the planet Earth was sufficiently interesting to warrant further thinking.

My advice is to look out this 22-year-old movie and see what, if anything, it brings up for you.