Word: alienation
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...universal action figures whose films require the fewest subtitles and therefore address masses most eloquently in remote cultures--might go anywhere on earth and never be a stranger. Is that desirable? Or a horror? Such planetary recognition may be as dangerous, in a different way, as being an unknown alien once...
Crouched in the undergrowth around the village of Samaki in northern Cambodia are several dozen men wearing protective vests and visors, looking like alien invaders. They skim the ground in front of them with metal detectors, and occasionally one raises an arm, a whistle is blown, and everyone moves back carefully. The land mine just discovered is detonated remotely, an explosion jogs the ground, and the field officer gives the all-clear. Then the Cambodians, who work for a British-based de-mining organization called Halo Trust, resume methodically clearing the heavily mined land around the village, one square foot...
...yourself city appears overnight. On one makeshift street, a three-story tower of scaffolding grows like a high-tech mushroom; draped with a parachute, it becomes an instant cafe. At a table, generous folks with a spare gallon of blue body paint offer to turn you into an alien. Behind them, two guys have built a house out of old wooden doors hauled in on a yellow rental truck. Inside you hear hypnotic techno music. The house will be gone 48 hours later, as will the rest of the instant city...
...kinky, if unspoken, attraction that develops between O'Neil and Viggo Mortensen's master chief, the man in charge of clubbing the baby SEALs into fighting trim, with sardonic objectivity. We know where Scott's sympathies lie--he did, after all, make those terrific tributes to female capability, Alien and Thelma & Louise--but he wears them lightly. What he does superbly is establish a raw, compelling reality that transcends his movie's banal premises and predictable conclusion. That permits Moore to play, and us to feel, authentic pain, isolation and courage--shocking stuff to find in an action movie these...
...meandering, melodic passages that take their own sweet time to work themselves out; jangling, spacey guitar work--all of it threaded together by singer Thom Yorke's yearning tenor, hitting and holding notes with almost operatic emotion. The lyrics display an X-Files-ish romanticism: one song, Subterranean Homesick Alien, is about a man who longs to be abducted by UFOs...