- Written and directed by Kenneth Johnson
- Starring
- Marc Singer
- Faye Grant
- Jane Badler
- Jenny Sullivan
- Michael Durrell
- Blair Tefkin
When V originally hit the airwaves, I was twelve years old and living in Maritime Canada. That’s one time zone further than Eastern, which means that the feed from the American station that supplied the Canadian broadcast was an hour later for me. That, coupled with the fact that my parents were very protective of my sleep (I always had the earliest bedtime in my class, and yes, I hated it with a passion), conspired to keep me from seeing it the first time around. Ditto with the follow-up mini-series, V: The Final Battle. The next year, when they were gearing up for the spin-off TV series, they broadcast a trimmed-down, feature-length version (if memory serves, it condensed both four-hour miniseries into a single two-hour block — or maybe they condensed each one into a two-hour broadcast and showed them on consecutive nights, I dunno). That’s what I finally saw as a lead in to the TV show.
It wasn’t until last year that I saw the whole thing in its untrimmed glory. I concluded that it was indeed cool (as it had seemed to my thirteen-year-old self), but much sillier even than I had thought at the time.
Gee, does this seem familiar to anyone?
You see, writer/director Kenneth Johnson had pitched the whole thing as “the French Resistence, but with aliens.” And so just about every minute of the show beats you over the head with the parallels, until you find yourself screaming at the screen, “Yes! We get it already!”
It all starts so benignly, and so familiarly to any of the younger generation who have seen Independence Day: Fifty gargantuan saucers appear in the skies, each settling in above a major city. There’s even a countdown broadcast, but instead of blowing up the White House when the counter reaches zero, the saucers broadcast a message of friendship and goodwill. They immediately reveal themselves to be just like us, and seeking only to exchange their phenomenal knowledge for some paltry chemicals which can be manufactured from Earth’s refuse.
Gosh, it all sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it?
Of course, since this is all meant to show us the effect that the Visitors’ arrival has on everybody, we get a wide cast of characters. Front and center are Mike Donovan (Marc Singer) and his sidekick Tony (Evan Kim), investigative reporters fresh from El Salvador who get chosen to show the inside of one of the motherships to the world; Mike’s parents, who run some sort of industrial site where the Visitors set up their chemistry set; July (Faye Grant), a biochemist working for a Nobel Prize-winning scientist; Robert (Michael Durrell), an anthropologist cursed with one of the stupidest offspring ever to impede the human race (Blair Tefkin); and Daniel (David Packer), who lives with his parents and his Holocaust-survivor grandfather Abraham (Leonardo Cimino). Plus sundry others, naturally. We’ve got four hours to fill, after all.
He’s a cold-hearted snake,
Look into his eyes (oh-oh)…
In fact, it’s almost comical to chart the ways in which everyone is related. Robert the anthropologist’s boss (Myron Healey) is one of the first to notice something odd about the Visitors, and thus one of the first to disappear. Robert’s family lives on the same block as Daniel and his parents and grandfather, and also the same street as the elder Donovans, who run the factory. Robert’s insipid daughter Robin (Blair Tefkin) is Daniel’s longtime crush; she’s also in the high school marching band, which plays at the factory when the Visitors arrive to set up shop. Also working at the factory is Caleb (Jason Bernard), whose one son Ben (Richard Lawson) works at the hospital with Julie; his other son is street hood Elias (Michael Wright). Caleb is also the worker injured in an accident at the plant and rescued by Willie (Robert Englund), the comic relief visitor. All we need now is a cameo by Kevin Bacon.
At first, the Visitors’ presence is both a novelty and a boost to Earth’s people and economy. But things start going weird. Scientists, notably, biologists and anthropologists, start disappearing; then others come forward, claiming that they had been approached by an international scientific conspiracy against the Visitors and their gifts. There’s a backlash against scientists, and the Visitors decide to hold off on sharing all of their technology. (Hmm. There’s an insidious enemy declared, and people start reacting against neighbors they’ve had forever. Are we getting this yet?)
But Mike and Tony get suspicious, since two of the scientists making the accusations appear to have suddenly switched from being right-handed to being left-handed, and Mike sneaks aboard the mothership. Thanks to the intergalactic law which states “All bad guys must have air ducts on their ships which will accomodate humans with a minimum of fuss,” Mike manages to spy on Diana (Jane Badler), one of the Visitor leaders, and an underling as they rehash for each other their nefarious machinations, including the judicious use of a brainwashing machine to convince the whistle-blowing scientists that they actually had been a part of a conspiracy. (Boy, it’s sure convenient that the Visitors keep speaking English even with each other.) He also finds out that they eat small furry things, and when he spies on the next room over, he finds out the awful truth: They’re really reptiles!
Mike manages to get away, but he’s declared a public enemy as the Visitors kindly protect world leaders by taking them into protective custody aboard their ships and instituting martial law.
And all through this, old Abraham is watching current events and saying, “This all seems so familiar!”
The face that made twenty-four million adolescent boys sit up and say, “Cool!”
This is more than a movie with a message; it’s a movie with a Message. And no method is too blatant to get that message across. The Visitors’ uniforms are vaguely Naziesque, and their symbol looks like a Swastika that’s been left out in the sun too long. The Visitors quickly establish a youth auxiliary called the “Visitors’ Friends,” who get their own uniform and are expected to rat out on scientists; young Daniel immediately joins up and goes powermad, much to his grandfather’s disgust. Once the Visitors have effectively taken over, society goes downhill, though why exactly is not explained: Would the disappearance of Congress have an effect on the price of fresh produce? Elements like that are more to maintain the parallel to occupied France than to chart an honest “what if?” scenario.
And you’d have to be dumb as a stump to miss the parallel, thanks again to Abraham. He even breaks out his own concentration camp stories and explains to his son how this is all similar to that, just so no one in the audience will miss the significance of any of this.
Given that so much of the plot concerns the “othering” of a societal segment (that’s the academe-speak word, you know), we’re left with an almost disturbing sequence of discovery when Mike gets on the mothership. As you know, these things are usually presented in order of impact, which goes like this:
- The aliens have been lying to us, and they are actually trying to undermine us!
- They eat poor defenseless live animals!!
- THEY’RE UGLY!!!
Yes, I understand that visual impact is greatest with the third revelation, and I understand that the Visitors’ human appearance is part of the overall deception, but I still find it more than a little sticky that a story which goes to such great lengths to remind us of the evil “Us/them” thinking which engendered the Holocaust then falls back on they revelation that “They aren’t like us!” for its righteous indignation.
Abraham, discussion leader for the “Historical Relevance For Dummies” group.
Unfortunately, all of this is the better part, and all of it takes place in the first half. Not unlike that other ’80s classic about aliens who aren’t what they seem, They Live, the second half falls back on more generic action tropes to fill out the plot. Granted, here at least it’s legitimate; they simply steal from old war movies as the Los Angeles resistance cell, centered around Julie, works to put together a lab to discover why the Visitors are so afraid of scientists. Mike manages to infiltrate the mothership twice, simply by putting on a Visitor uniform and walking onto a shuttlecraft. (Think the Nazis would’ve done so much damage if their security had been so laughable?) He also finds out the goal of all of this: The Visitors plan to steal all of our water and eat our people! (Apparently, none of them ever took a “ranch management” course back in school.) Fortunately, Mike also discovers that there are a very few Visitors who disagree with the plan of conquest lined out by their Great Leader back home, and are willing to help the resistance.
(Another beat-you-over-the-head moment:
Mike: “How’d someone like that get to be your leader, anyway?”
Martin (a friendly Visitor): “Charisma. Circumstances. Promises. Not enough of us spoke out to question him until it was too late. It happens on your planet, doesn’t it?”
WE GET IT, ALREADY!)
Because this isn’t the end of the story, we end with no resolution, except the determination to keep fighting — which shouldn’t be as insurmountable as you might think, because the Visitors have already proven themselves to be exceptionally stupid. Why bother with this entire infiltration and occupation plan, when you plan to stripmine our resources and serve our people for hors d’oeuvres? Frankly, the Independence Day approach makes a lot more sense: blast the major centers, keep the semi-intelligent humans from communicating or organizing, and take what you want at your leisure. (Just don’t let them linger around long enough to figure out how to fly Harriers.) Of course, the situation presented here honors the long-standing, unwritten tradition of alien invasion movies: The aliens’ technology should only be marginally more advanced than ours. (Just imagine if the Independence Day meanies had set down in Victorian England instead of those immunodeficient tripod riders.)
No, I’m not going to stoop to a “beauty is only skin deep” gag. Make up your own.
This review wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the performance of Michael Wright as the street hood who has a love/hate relationship with his doctor brother. Most everyone’s performances are solid, but Wright blows me away; his denial-ridden monologue when his older brother dies in front of him as a result of a resistance foray is just plain powerful.
On the other hand, no review of V would be complete without a mention of the greatest liability to human survival — Robin (Blair Tefkin), über-idiotic teenage daughter of milksop Robert. If I were an intelligent scientist that had such a brainless twit for a child, I would consider it conclusive proof that my wife had been fooling around. Her life revolves around her insipid teenage needs; when her family is on the run for their very lives, she whines, “But all my friends are here!” When they have to hide, Anne Frank-like, in Abraham’s poolhouse (despite the fact that his grandson Daniel is the Compleat Sympathizer), she immediately reveals their hiding place to Daniel, completely oblivious to the fact that this is a Bad Thing. She goes ga-ga over young hot Visitor Brian (Peter Nelson), even after it’s been explained to her that the Visitors want her and her family dead. When her father stupidly takes her along to the tunnel-based resistance base under LA, she immediately decides to saunter out from a past-curfew stroll, getting herself caught and causing no end of havoc. And by the end, after her actions (combined with her father’s wishy-washiness) have gotten her own mother and several others killed, it turns out that she’s been impregnated by Brian. Good going, girl. Can we pay you enough to go work for the other side?
With all of this criticism and hindsight, I’ll end on a positive note: I watched this with my seven-year-old son. He was entranced, and afterward his interest gave me occasion to explain about World War 2 and the Holocaust. A long documentary would have been too much for him; The Diary of Anne Frank, I fear, would have been too damned scary, and he would have had nightmares for weeks. But this parable about the War was enough of an introduction that I could explain to him the evil of Hitler, in terms that he could understand. That, quite possibly, is a benefit that cancels out all of the negative things I’ve said. Because if that history doesn’t keep getting told, in whatever form will make the hearers sit up and pay attention, then, as Abraham repeats, we haven’t learned a thing.
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 20
- breasts: 0
- explosions: 56
- ominous thunderstorms: 1
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 4
- Michael Durrell (Robert the anthropologist) played General Hazar in the DS9 episode “Sanctury”
- Ruchard Herd (“John,” the Visitors’ nominal leader) played L’Kor in the TNG two-parter “Birthright,” and had a recurring role on Voyager as Admiral Owen Paris
- Andrew Prine (“Steven,” another Visitor) played Lieutenant Suna in the TNG episode “Frame of Mind” and Legate Turrell in the DS9 episode “Life Support”
- Momo Yashima (have no idea what she played) was a crew member in Star Trek: The Motion Picture
