One of the central plot lines was a human character's transformation into an alien. He is a private contractor hired by the government to help move 1.8 million stranded aliens from a shanty town to a concentration camp. One of his tasks, while moving the aliens, is to collect alien technology and weaponry. He stumbles upon some technology that infects him with the alien DNA.
His driving motivation then becomes, throughout the rest of the movie, to stop this transformation. The transformation is really nasty ... very much inspired by "The Fly" by that guy Cronenburg. And I was really interested in it.
One of the underlying themes of the movie is immigration. The aliens are literal "illegal aliens," and human society reacts by isolating them, containing them. But any of those solution fails ... the alien population continues to grow and grow. And the longer that the aliens are ghettoized and forced into the role of second-class citizenship, the worse the aliens become. They are scavengers and often criminals. And there's a growing specter of the future ... as there are more and more aliens, they are only going to become more of a problem.
The human-turning-alien embodies the immigration anxiety perfectly. Aliens are "taking over." As the human and alien DNA merge, the man's body becomes monstrous, something unrecognizable. Similarly, as human and alien society merge, people are afraid that society will become something monstrous and unrecognizable.
It made me think of all those Anglo town hall protesters and tea baggers, holding up Nazi Obama signs and screaming about the fore-fathers. Screaming about how "their America" is changing ... into something monstrous and unrecognizable.
It wasn't necessarily an optimistic movie. It made me wonder how many more years before the booming Latino population makes Texas into a swing state.
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