TARGET EARTH
US, 1998, 95 minutes, Colour.
Christopher Meloni, Marcia Cross, John C.Mc Ginley, Dabney Coleman.
Directed by Peter Markle.
Target Earth is something of a footnote in the history of science fiction films and encounters with aliens. It is brief, was made for television, has some interesting ideas akin to so many other films but in its presentation is rather routine.
Coming at the end of the 1990s, it is somewhat lost in the tradition of the films of the 1970s, perhaps something of a throwback to the small-budget features of the 1950s.
The setting is Ohio, a small neighbourhood where a woman having her house fixed by electricians is overwhelmed by a huge spacecraft which sets off explosions. In the meantime, there is a fugitive in the woods who then takes a little girl and communicates alien codes to her. In the meantime, there is a detective played by Christopher Maloney, who is involved in a number of cases, but finds a little girl and restores her to her mother, Marcy a Cross.
There is something wrong with the little girl and, it eventually emerges, that they have have been many abductions over the years (and a revelation, of course, that Christopher Maloney’s wife had been abducted and had disappeared). There is an FBI investigation to find the man in the woods, led by John C McGinley?, Bald, and with the word in the back of his neck – and not too difficult to realise that he is one of the alien victims, who have all been injected and are serving as sleepers until awakened.
The aliens do want to take over the world though their chief, Chad Lowe, is intrigued by his experiences of listening to Mozart!
With plot complications, the detective and the mother and their child are pursued by police, detective shooting his partner who is also one of the victims, the pseudo-FBI. They find refuge with a group of high-tech rebels who have recovered from being injected and are trying to find the location for the telemetry port for the forthcoming spacecraft.
There is some political and military complications, especially with the deal done by the aliens with a senator, the detective’s uncle, played by Dabney Coleman.
It all comes to a head when the building for the telemetry port is found, the detective confronting the false FBI agent, fighting, and the hero being able to detonate explosives in the nick of time to destroy the heliport – with signals in the sky that the spacecraft cannot land and has to return to space.
Happy ending, the detective, the mother and daughter sitting on the porch of the lady who had experienced the spacecraft, reported to the detective who had not believed her.
