SUBJECT: ROSWELL THE MOVIE REVIEW FILE: UFO2209
"Roswell"
ROSWELL (1994). Kyle MacLachlan, Kim Greist, Dwight Yoakam. An intelligence
officer searches for the _real_ truth behind mysterious crash debris found in
1947, remains he believes were from a downed flying saucer -- with the crew
aboard.
A Showtime original. (Adult Themes) [1:31] SHO: 31 (8p)
Premiere Directed by Jeremy Kagan
"The story of the century lasted for most of the afternoon on July 8, 1947"
Kevin Randle and Don Schmitt
'The Truth about the UFO crash at Roswell'
M Evans & Co. 1994
Roswell, New Mexico is as good an allegory for the American spirit as any
small town can be. All but lost on the eastern plains of New Mexico, it is
out of the way from anywhere to anywhere else. That other American icon,
Route 66, runs through the northern part of the state and Albuquerque. If
the weather is bad, or you are going to Texas, you'll take the southern route
through Lordsburg, Deming and Las Cruces on your way to El Paso. In between,
on the far side of the Capitan and Sacramento mountain ranges from where the
Rio Grande valley cuts the state in half, is Roswell, with a populace less
than 45,000.
You can trust your neighbors in Roswell. The generations who settled the city
had to work hard together. People acknowledge one another on the street and
outside of town will stop to help a vehicle in trouble. In exchange for the
rigors of the remote location they get no gang violence, a future they can
expect and a government they can trust.
South of the town lies an industrial park located on the remains of the
former Army Air Field that gave the city its dose of furtive notoriety. Just
after World War II Roswell could boast the world's only atomic bomb squadron,
the 509th bomb group. At the time such distinction was not a cause for much
public scrutiny. It's exactly the obscure location that would allow such a
sensitive military asset to find a home in Roswell.
But atomic bombers came and went and Roswell lapsed into the timeless small
town routine that Ward Cleaver would call the good life. Then, in the middle
seventies, odd stories began to surface about the activities of the 509th in
the summer of 1947. Twenty years and four books later, the name Roswell is
now inextricably linked with the most remarkable set of allegations to be
made in the dense web of public confusion that is the phenomenon of
Unidentified Flying Objects.
The investigators Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt claim that, at the height
of a wave of sightings of flying crescent shaped discs that swept across the
country in the summer of 1947, one of the discs crashed into the base of a
bluff about 35 miles northwest of the front gate of the air base. They also
claim that, after securing the area, bribing and threatening the populace
into secrecy, the United States Government has managed to keep the fact that
an extraterrestrial craft crashed there secret for nearly half a century.
If indeed that is the case, it is about to change. Producer Paul Davids and
Director Jeremy Kagan have made the movie that is to the
still-obscure-by-normal-standards Roswell Incident what 'JFK' was to the
Kennedy Assassination. In doing so, Davids and Kagan have very nicely framed
arguments about the existence of a coverup and the reasons for one. Not to
mention documenting the event for anyone with cable television or a VCR.
If you have read the material, you will recognize 'Roswell' as an accurate
docudrama. If not, you might think it an intriguing bit of fiction. It is
that blurry duality that represents the core problem in addressing the clear
and substantial evidence of UFO's which points to technology or other forces
operating with a deliberate agenda of deception from a base outside our
normal reality. It is too easy to dismiss accounts as being fictional if
they fall too far outside the parameters of common belief. And using
fictional drama to present the best estimate of an unknown reality, such as
Whitley Streiber did in his literary treatment of the same case, 'Majestic',
serves to add to the potential confusion as much as to enlighten the masses.
Writing a documentary screenplay about a mystery with no firm solution is a
difficult task. Davids, the driving force behind the project, has managed to
do just that. The 'Roswell' story is not one of aliens, but of one man's
quest for truth and redemption. The searcher is an aging Major Jesse Marcel,
(nicely played across several decades by Kyle MacLachlan) one of two army air
corps officers to initially examine the debris and recognize it as not of
this planet. As an element of the coverup, Marcel was sworn to secrecy and
then made to look the dunce by superior officers during a press conference.
General Roger Ramey claimed the intelligence officer could not tell the
difference between a spacecraft and a weather balloon. Over time, Marcel's
duty to remain silent is at greater and greater odds with his sense of
dignity and fairness.
The docudrama unfolds during a 1970's reunion of the 509th, where Marcel
takes the last opportunity of his life to query former squadron members and
attempt to piece together the events of 1947. Bit by bit, pieces of the
story are found, some coming quickly from casual observers, others dragged
out of reluctant witnesses. Any one of them is at best a fuzzy memory. Not
all of them fit together. Those that do have jagged edges. Some directly
contradict others. The picture that forms confirms Marcel's opinion and
provides a suggestion of an alien presence on earth much more serious than
that proffered by the tabloid press. Along the way, the story mirrors the
investigation of Randle and Schmitt, showing the difficulty of correlating
different versions of events.
Eventually, Marcel's curiosity gains him the attention of a shadowy figure
played with appropriate self confidence by Martin Sheen, who takes him to an
abandoned hanger and sketches in the missing portions of the picture. A
crashed alien craft at the beginnings of a Cold War between the US and a
paranoid super power. A clandestine effort to care for the one alien left
alive and reverse engineering of the phenomenal craft. A rationale for
secrecy to avoid provoking preemptive action by an all too human enemy. A
self-reinforcing conundrum of deception and ridicule by now so convoluted
that no sitting government could admit to having been involved in it. An
escalation of explanation from the mundane to the inescapable. At the
climatic moment we hope and pray that the blanket of denial will be torn away
and the truth, whatever it is, will be laid bare.
It is. You have to see the film to appreciate the cosmic irony of the hangar
scene. I shall not reveal the logic that concludes the confrontation between
one man searching for the truth and the nameless representative of his
government who dangles it before him. I suggest you tape a copy of the Star
Trek: The Next Generation episode 'First Contact' and 'Roswell', then watch
them back to back. The two are flip sides of the same coin and both sides
have the same value.
'Roswell' the movie has the hand crafted feel of a small town main street.
Given the option of telling the story with the confines of a SHOWTIME budget
or risking not telling it at all, Davids elected to do the former. The
resulting concentration on the people and the period instead of speculation
by special effects of what actually hit the ground on the night of July 4,
1947 helps the piece. In the tradition of 'Fire in the Sky', but without the
studio executive's intrusion on the documentary, we see the effect of a very
unusual event on the lives of generally usual people. The momentum of the
story suffers occasionally from the process of maintaining consistency with
the facts in the case.
All in all, Roswell is a good watch, as good as any in the summer cable
line-up. The baseline of understanding in the ongoing debate on-line and
elsewhere has been raised. If you feel compelled offer an opinion about
extraterrestrial life and/or the capability of the government to keep
secrets, make sure you have seen this movie and read the book by Randle and
Schmitt before you do or risk being flamed as a newbie.
Davids presents the essential questions of the unresolved UFO cover-up
controversy very well indeed. While thankfully avoiding the side issues such
as the debate about one or two crash sites or the archaeologists presented in
the 1994 Randle and Schmitt book 'The Truth about the UFO Crash at Roswell',
the movie touches all the bases dear to the UFO community. 'Roswell' will
give anyone-believer or hardened skeptic-pause for thought about the other
side of the UFO issue.
The closing scene shows a determined Marcel back at the crash site, making a
final futile effort to find a solid piece of evidence, one tangible remainder
of an event that has haunted him for years. As the sun sets behind the
Capitans, Marcel realizes that no amount of hoping will uncover the piece of
alien craft that would prove once and for all the government is lying. As we
pull back to realize how vast the plains are and how hopeless his quest, we
see Jesse Marcel as the best allegory for the American spirit any man can be.
Watching the film makes it clear that if any of the alleged incident is true,
or anything like it is, then the American public is the unknowing victim of
the most heinous form of repression conceivable. Contact with
extraterrestrial life is the most significant step a planetary civilization
can take. The prospects for good are beyond description. Who gets to make
the decision that we who have settled this planet are not ready for the fact
that we are not alone? The argument against an overtly aggressive alien
presence is simple and persuasive. Given that they can get here, across
interstellar distances or dimensional shifts, then they have the technology
to wage a devastating war and win it decisively if that were their purpose.
Logic dictates a net nonaggressive position on the part of any alien race
that may have already discovered us. More likely, they are waiting patiently
for us to grow beyond the aggressive response patterns of our lower origins.
Indeed, we may have committed the grievous error by welcoming the early
reconnaissance of visitors from other worlds with attempts to shoot their
craft down. Extraterrestrial contact, if or when it occurs, is too important
to be left to government, least of all paranoid elements of the intelligence
community in whose hands 'Roswell' (and most of the UFO community) claims it
lays. What does surface is an appreciation of how the truth could be hidden
more or less in plain sight, varnished with a thin layer of denial and
ridicule.
It is also clear that whatever the case may have been in the 1940's, if a
coverup was started at that time, it is by now so ingrown that only an
extremely clear political message from the people in whose name the secret is
being kept can provide the impetus to end it. 'Roswell' is a movie that took
a lot of perseverance and moxie to make. The consequences of it being even
close to the truth are too profound to be dismissed. If you don't dismiss it
as an intriguing fiction then download the Roswell Declaration on America
Online, sign it and sent it in. In that manner, the consequences of making
it will be worth the investment and risk the filmmakers have taken.
Killing a president is one thing. Denying a society the truth about their
place in the cosmos and, possibly, their origins is another. No amount of
investigation or revelation will bring John Kennedy back to life or change
our history back to what it might have been had he not been shot. But the
revelation of the facts about what happened at Roswell is the reversal of
policy needed to make things right with our growth as a species. The cold
war is over. The world is still in crisis, but the enemy is anarchy, not
totalitarianism. Any justification for a coverup of the sort depicted in
'Roswell' no longer exists.
Whatever happened outside Roswell, the government has not properly explained
it. And whatever it was, it scared the government so much that extraordinary
measures were taken to hide it from the American people. If you have any
threads of the spirit of '76 in your soul, if you can explain to your
children why they held the Boston Tea Party-or worse yet, if you can't-then
watch this movie. It premieres on July 30th, shows three times in August and
then four more times in December on the Showtime cable network.
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