Roswell   Starring: Martin Sheen and Kyle MacLachlan Fabulous Films / Freemantle Media Enterprises RRP: £14.99 FHED2892 Certificate: 12 Available 26 March 2012

Arriving at the thirty year anniversary for his nuclear bomber air wing, Jesse Marcel seeks answers about events which determined his career, following the 1947 discovery of a crashed alien ship in Roswell, New Mexico...

Roswell (1994 - 1 hr, 31 min, 23 sec) is a television film which examines the events at Roswell from a perspective indicating that the alien crash really happened. The story is told in flashback as Major Jesse Marcel (Kyle MacLachlan) tries to discover why he had to lie about what he found. The movie was directed by Jeremy Kagan, who succeeds in leaching any sense of drama out of the proceedings. The movie was nominated for a Golden Globe.

The story follows the purported events with the finding of the alien ship and its occupants and the eventual cover up which ensued, forever blighting Marcel’s military career as the man who mistook a weather balloon for an alien craft.

It’s difficult to know what to say about the movie, the directing is adequate as is the acting, but the whole thing ends up feeling workman like dull. Opening with actual film of people discussing UFOs, overlaid on unconvincing film of actual supposed saucers sets the film up well, giving the impression that the piece will have a more paranoid feeling to it.

The inclusion of Kyle MacLachlan and Martin Sheen whet the appetite, until you discover that Sheen is hardly in the film and MacLachlan, whilst a good actor, plays his character with the same tonal note throughout. The slow pace of the movie presumably was a deliberate attempt to deal with the subject as seriously as possible, but then if this were the case a straight forward documentary would have served the story better.

The disc does contain a couple of extras, including a gallery, unfortunately not of any surviving pictures of the actual characters and places, but shots taken from the movie. The UFO Chronicles (1 hr, 02 min, 08 sec) is a documentary which looks at the phenomena of UFO sightings, which presents a lot of speculation and first hand reports, but no actual hard evidence, but then true believers will see every blurry picture as evidence of the truth.

Fans of Roswell will find a lot to like here as the film agrees that the events actually took place. The casual viewer might feel that the piece is just too slow to maintain your attention.

6

Charles Packer