The Arrival

They have been saying for years that the Greenhouse Effect is going to destroy the planet. For years humans have blamed themselves for spewing climate-changing gasses into our fragile atmosphere. But are we as guilty as we think we are or are there more sinister forces at work? Paying tribute to an old-fashioned '50s style paranoid (the aliens have come to take over the planet) sci-fi low-budget thriller, this film gives a chilling answer to that question. It begins with the scene of a young woman picking poppies in a verdant field. She is obviously puzzled and as the camera pulls away it becomes clear why. The story then jumps to a California observatory where nerdish radio telescope operator Zane Ziminski is suddenly jarred from the boredom of monitoring random space noises by a strangely regular series of unearthly blips that he is convinced come from an alien galaxy and for some reason are being deliberately beamed to Earth. Excitedly he takes the recorded evidence to his boss, who promptly fires him. Convinced that the aliens were transmitting messages to aliens already on our planet, Ziminski quickly builds a make-shift radio telescope and high tech computer system in his garage so he can pinpoit the destination of the singles. This leads him to an isolated Mexican village where he and another scientist (the lady from the poppy field), who has drawn similar conclusions, team up and go alien-hunting. They don't hunt long, for the villagers turn out to be mighty strange people. From there it is only a short time before they find the underground alien lair where they learn that the invaders' home planet is dying and that they are planning to "terraform" the Earth in preparation of colonizing it. Part of the process involves deliberately accelerating the Greenhouse effect. The special effects are well-done and refreshingly, they are not overpowering.