Combat, mano a pseudopod.

Rating: 5/10 (25 June 2005)

As action flicks go, this one's pretty typical. Arnold leads the usual band of expert musclemen into some tropical country on a mercy mission, or was it a mercenary mission, picks up a pretty young Latina (Elpidia Carillo) after a furious battle with well-armed swarthy guerrillas who make easy targets, and encounters a -- well, an alien, while on his way back to meet the chopper at the rendezvous.
As Arnold pointed out at the time of release, you really get two movies for one. A regular excursion action flick and a science-fiction action flick.
Boy, are these guys macho. (One of them is one of those North American Indians with an intuitive, spiritual collective unconscious who senses when the thing is nearby.) And they carry the ugliest guns ever seen on screen.
It's the kind of "lost patrol" movie in which the characters get picked off one by one by an unseen enemy until, in this example, only Arnold and Carillo are left alive to hop on the chopper. The major difference between most examples of the genre and this one is that the other examples ordinarily take breathers and give the characters a chance to chat, so we get to know them a little. Not much time for that here. A coffee break would mean one less opportunity for the group to shred the banana plants with their slugs and grenades.
The alien gave me a bit of a problem, I have to say. Here he is, all decked out in high-tech equipment including a helmet that gives his vision infra-red capabilities. (He presses Arnold's head up against a tree and examines it carefully through this heat-registering device and you can tell what great shape Arnold is in because his nose is cold.) He's also got some kind of rocket launchers built into his arms and carries some strap ons that enable him to heal quickly or, failing that, to set off an atomic explosion.
All of that high-tech stuff didn't bother me. But his organic evolution hasn't seem to have kept up with his technology. Okay, he's got opposable thumbs. Thank heaven for small favors. And he's bipedal. But that's about it. How do you design and build delicate equipment like that when your fingers end in claws? And when he removes his helmet we see that his mouth is surrounded by four maxillapods, crab-like claws that can serve no other purpose than to shovel food into his diminutive mouth. They've invented space travel but not the fork? Finally, his hair is made up into dreadful dreadlocks, which looks pretty retro from our perspective.
What's this alien doing here anyway? "He comes when the summer is hot," Elpidia intones. (A sissy after all.) He seems to be a trophy hunter. He skins the people he kills but then seems to do nothing with the body except burn it so he can add the skull to his collection. He fawns proudly over those skulls.
Does he show any other values aside from the desire to kill other living beings and preserve their heads as trophies? What I mean is, does he have any NON-HUMAN traits? Well, actually no. While they are being pursued, Elpidia drops a weapon and Arnold stops her and says, "No! He didn't gill you befawh because you vair unahmed." Later on, though, he shows no such compunction about deciding to kill a wounded and unarmed Arnold. Then, too, when challenged directly by Arnold at the end, the alien unburdens himself of his technological accoutrements and faces Arnold hand to hand, raising the question of whether they have Roy Rogers movies on the place from whence the alien came.
If you're a fan of action movies, Arnold, earth-bound science fiction, or any combination thereof, catch this one if you haven't seen it yet.