I really hate conspiracy theorists. They make me want to vomit, honestly. Everything from the Kennedy assassinations to 9/11 to the freaking Illuminati, Masonic Templars working with the Mossad to abduct our cattle or whatever, there's no end to it. My favorite is actually Sterling Hayden's theory about fluoridation of the water from DR. STRANGELOVE and the global commie plot to sap & impurify all of our precious bodily fluid. Now THAT I can believe.
I'd rank ROSWELL up there with Oliver Stoneground's JFK as amongst the most effective examples of conspiracy theory propaganda masquerading as an entertainment extravaganza. The proof is that I am actually acquainted with several dunderheads who are of the opinion that BOTH films show what really happened, albeit in the form of historical reconstructions. Both films press every button in their respective conspiratorial play book, with ghoulish government secrecy, evil rogue military industrial shenanigans, shady men in black suits, doubletalk, doublethink, and a conveniently noble hero/fall guy "everyman" at the center of both stories, ROSWELL delivers the goods and is convincing enough to get away with re-writing history as the paranoid would have it be taught. But it's only a movie, and a flawed one at that.
The main problem is that contemporary teaching implies that both heroes misled themselves in regards to much of the mythos that made their stories so compelling, and that the truth behind the conspiracy is actually mundane, anti-romantic and a buzzkill compared to the sexy conspiracies outlined. Punctuated by official sounding military jargon (the expression "mandate" is sternly referred to repeatedly), an apparent obsessive eye for period detail right down to Kyle MaClachlan puffing on unfiltered cigarettes, snappy looking 1940's suits and some laughable matte paintings showing that which the dingbats drawn to this stuff WANT to see.
To quote Harry Nilsson, we see what we want to see and we hear what we want to hear. In 1995 when I first encountered this movie I also desperately wanted to believe every last bit of nonsense hurled at the viewer like a face full of compressed cheeze. Sure, there probably are some basic truths suggested by the film but it's done with such a zest for showing those myths in a suggestive enough manner so that people are actually convinced that they have seen what the wreckage field really looked like, what the aliens really looked like, heard the threats made against the witnesses to stay silent or perpetuate some lie, and the finger of blame pointed squarely at the US government.
I am still convinced that something out of the ordinary happened at Roswell in 1947 without the laughable nonsense portrayed in this movie. I am not sure if it involved the crash of an extra terrestrial spacecraft so much as misidentification of something that shouldn't have been where it was found. And in spite of my stern admonishment above I don't believe that the feds have come clean on the incident, mostly because whatever may or may not have happened was "covered up" so quickly that there isn't a paper trail that can prove OR disprove the wildest of allegations -- That a flying saucer crashed, a rancher found bits of the junk, that a second crash site was found complete with alien life forms who may not have been quite dead.
The second crash site is important because, like all good conspiracy theories, it answers one of the basic problems with it's core premise, in this case the legendary "debris field" reports: Where were the working parts? Where were the engines and the cabin seats and the landing gear? All they found was a few yards worth of tinfoil, balsa sticks, scotch tape and some filament materials. How do you get a rocket ship out of that? And the obvious answer is that it wasn't the rocket ship, just part of it. That lets the theorists off the hook for not having enough junk to make a rocket ship, with the convenient answer that the government hid it all away in the Blue Room at Wright Patterson or out at Area 51.
One thing you have to keep in mind when thinking about paranormal phenomenon is that eye witnesses are statistically unreliable: You can't reproduce what they claim to have seen, and their stories tend to change over time. Jesse Marcel himself was guilty of embellishing his story of coming in contact with the wreckage, adding new details every time he told the story. One could argue that he was simply remembering more detail as time went on, but the fact remains that when you look at the reports and evidence collected in 1947 it sounds a lot less sexy than what was being remembered thirty, forty, and fifty years later.
That doesn't make this a bad movie by the way; In spite of some retarded high school drama club "aging" makeup, histrionic over-acting (the "I saw the bodies!" by a fictional nurse character is a really bad laugh), Martin Sheen lurking around just being Martin Sheen, and a condensed cliffnotes version of the story, ROSWELL is immensely watchable, conspiracy thinking viewers will find it very entertaining and as others point out some of the issues the movie raise probably have a certain amount of veracity to them. But just remember it's propaganda made by people who want viewers to arrive at a specific conclusion, and if you don't keep your thinking cap on you'll find yourself snookered into believing it like some of the people I know, one of whom I had a heated argument with over the fact that it's a MOVIE, a work of fiction, and an entertainment. Just like JFK, though a bit more fun, innocent, and less obnoxious.
4/10
I'd rank ROSWELL up there with Oliver Stoneground's JFK as amongst the most effective examples of conspiracy theory propaganda masquerading as an entertainment extravaganza. The proof is that I am actually acquainted with several dunderheads who are of the opinion that BOTH films show what really happened, albeit in the form of historical reconstructions. Both films press every button in their respective conspiratorial play book, with ghoulish government secrecy, evil rogue military industrial shenanigans, shady men in black suits, doubletalk, doublethink, and a conveniently noble hero/fall guy "everyman" at the center of both stories, ROSWELL delivers the goods and is convincing enough to get away with re-writing history as the paranoid would have it be taught. But it's only a movie, and a flawed one at that.
The main problem is that contemporary teaching implies that both heroes misled themselves in regards to much of the mythos that made their stories so compelling, and that the truth behind the conspiracy is actually mundane, anti-romantic and a buzzkill compared to the sexy conspiracies outlined. Punctuated by official sounding military jargon (the expression "mandate" is sternly referred to repeatedly), an apparent obsessive eye for period detail right down to Kyle MaClachlan puffing on unfiltered cigarettes, snappy looking 1940's suits and some laughable matte paintings showing that which the dingbats drawn to this stuff WANT to see.
To quote Harry Nilsson, we see what we want to see and we hear what we want to hear. In 1995 when I first encountered this movie I also desperately wanted to believe every last bit of nonsense hurled at the viewer like a face full of compressed cheeze. Sure, there probably are some basic truths suggested by the film but it's done with such a zest for showing those myths in a suggestive enough manner so that people are actually convinced that they have seen what the wreckage field really looked like, what the aliens really looked like, heard the threats made against the witnesses to stay silent or perpetuate some lie, and the finger of blame pointed squarely at the US government.
I am still convinced that something out of the ordinary happened at Roswell in 1947 without the laughable nonsense portrayed in this movie. I am not sure if it involved the crash of an extra terrestrial spacecraft so much as misidentification of something that shouldn't have been where it was found. And in spite of my stern admonishment above I don't believe that the feds have come clean on the incident, mostly because whatever may or may not have happened was "covered up" so quickly that there isn't a paper trail that can prove OR disprove the wildest of allegations -- That a flying saucer crashed, a rancher found bits of the junk, that a second crash site was found complete with alien life forms who may not have been quite dead.
The second crash site is important because, like all good conspiracy theories, it answers one of the basic problems with it's core premise, in this case the legendary "debris field" reports: Where were the working parts? Where were the engines and the cabin seats and the landing gear? All they found was a few yards worth of tinfoil, balsa sticks, scotch tape and some filament materials. How do you get a rocket ship out of that? And the obvious answer is that it wasn't the rocket ship, just part of it. That lets the theorists off the hook for not having enough junk to make a rocket ship, with the convenient answer that the government hid it all away in the Blue Room at Wright Patterson or out at Area 51.
One thing you have to keep in mind when thinking about paranormal phenomenon is that eye witnesses are statistically unreliable: You can't reproduce what they claim to have seen, and their stories tend to change over time. Jesse Marcel himself was guilty of embellishing his story of coming in contact with the wreckage, adding new details every time he told the story. One could argue that he was simply remembering more detail as time went on, but the fact remains that when you look at the reports and evidence collected in 1947 it sounds a lot less sexy than what was being remembered thirty, forty, and fifty years later.
That doesn't make this a bad movie by the way; In spite of some retarded high school drama club "aging" makeup, histrionic over-acting (the "I saw the bodies!" by a fictional nurse character is a really bad laugh), Martin Sheen lurking around just being Martin Sheen, and a condensed cliffnotes version of the story, ROSWELL is immensely watchable, conspiracy thinking viewers will find it very entertaining and as others point out some of the issues the movie raise probably have a certain amount of veracity to them. But just remember it's propaganda made by people who want viewers to arrive at a specific conclusion, and if you don't keep your thinking cap on you'll find yourself snookered into believing it like some of the people I know, one of whom I had a heated argument with over the fact that it's a MOVIE, a work of fiction, and an entertainment. Just like JFK, though a bit more fun, innocent, and less obnoxious.
4/10