Fear102's Rating and Review:

Director - Kevin Tenney
Starring - Patrick Muldoon, Jane Sibbett, Michael Sarrazin, Catherine Blythe and Michael Scherer

     Due to a friends recommendation I rented Arrival II last night. Although I'm not really upset in that I did enjoy the movie on kind of a Joe Queenan, love the incompetence of it all, level. I actually did see the original and from what I remember, that was a pretty good flick.

    This movie was nothing but a follow the rules, boilerplate, aliens are coming/government is involved piece of tripe.   No lesbians involved, but it did have the chick who plays a lesbian on Friends in the lead female role. Although, her appearance pissed me off because she never freed the twins. I mean this movie has a no-name actress who appears once in a while and she has her top off in the first 10 minutes, but our little pseudo-celebrity star apparently thinks she has reached a hollywood plateau which puts her above showin the globes.

     As a side note, watch the scene where he returns to his little govt agency he works for with the friends dyke and the cops are there looking for him. As he's leaving they get locked in and he breaks out by throwing some stand up ashtry looking thing through the glass doors to break out. Okay, now 5 seconds of thought about this and you would realize that in a great big highly secure building like this, those glass doors are probably an inch thick, yet this little piece of aluminum, tossed at an arc, manages to smash right through this glass door and provide an escape route. If you watch the scene carefully you will see that when the ashtry is about 6 inches from the door the glass explodes and the ashtry continues flying through the air until it hits the already smashed out glass and flies through. They had to have noticed this in editing which means they didn't want to commit an extra couple hundred bucks to buy a new door and try to get the scene right.

     Anyhow, our lead character of course is some sort of scientific expert, as they always are in movies like this. This time he is a computer expert. Here is what they expect us to believe. They find this alien device which can be powered up by a "powerful laser", apparently any laser will do, either the one they provided and was lost or a slide projector(which I didn't even realize contained lasers) to a digital camera, to a powerful "industrial laser" which they leave sitting around unprotected at the local university. Well when they power this baby up it creates a kind of holodeck environment which our hero realizes is like a display screen on a computer. I was begging and pleading for them not to do it but sure enough our guy's job as a "computer expert" here on earth has qualified him to operate this alien computer because thats what he knows. Never mind that it is not controlled by anything any human has ever seen and never mind that the language is made out of all alient characters. Well, armed with the alien PC, what do we do with it? Do we do a Star Trek vs. Borg and trick them into falling asleep? Do we do an Independence Day and insert a virus into their mother ship? Perhaps something even more clever than one of those tricks?   Not necessary, apparently these aliens didn't bother to secure their "Central Control Structure" so it was a simple matter of inserting a single command to tell them to abort their dastardly deeds (despite not knowing their language). Unfortunately the aliens were able to stop this command before it completed. This movie is just further proof that Hollywood has given up on even trying any more.