Nukie (1987)

For much of Nukie, a tale of a pair of extraterrestrial brothers separated and stranded on Earth, I was convinced what I was seeing was the culmination of days, if not just hours, of work by people who themselves had just landed from another world and had never seen a movie in their life.

While it clearly, desperately wanted to rip off E.T. the Extraterrestrial (there’s a little ugly brown alien with giant eyes just like E.T., but even better, there are two of them!), the film’s seemingly random melange of characters and storylines (there’s a witch doctor who wants to kill the village twins, a nun who simultaneously tries to civilize the natives while complaining to a NASA doctor about the dangers of bringing the modern world to the village, a computer AI who develops a heart with feelings and a NASA administrator who wants to be a clown) will leave the unsuspecting viewer feeling like she was exposed to some alien brain devouring microbe. (Did Nukie just accidentally cause an earthquake because he wished the earth would devour him and somehow it did so that when he wakes up and busts out of the ground everything in the village is trashed? Or did I somehow get trashed and just didn’t know it?)

But as first the twins were wondering alone in the wilderness after being expelled for being bad luck (they were blamed for Nukie’s hijinks) and one gets snake bit necessitating a quick rescue by the American NASA doctor in the area, then Nukie and the other twin were wondering alone in the wilderness in search of America (aren’t we all?) followed by Nukie apparently dying after hilariously going over a giant waterfall while back in America Nukie’s brother Miko is having his own misadventures being experimented on by an evil NASA scientist while making friends with the NASA computer, I suddenly realized this film had so much more ambition than E.T.

With is multitude of characters who had their own intersecting plotlines, Nukie was not so much a pale copy of its American counterpart, but was more akin to a Robert Altman film. Like if Nashville featured little dudes dressed in turd colored alien costumes!

Nukie and Miko are beings who can transform into light and fly around. At various points during the film the exhibit a veritable catalog of other super awesome outer space powers like telepathy, speaking to animals and most impressively of all, dancing and shooting fireworks off with their hands in an effort to lull the twins to fall asleep. (It was also very effective on the viewer!)

Somehow they crashland on Earth, Miko in America and Nukie in central Africa of all places! (Most likely because this is a South African film.) While Miko is subjected to all sorts of injections, Nukie says he wants to rescue his brother, but spends the entirety of the film accomplishing nothing but almost getting the twins killed and crashing the helicopter he takes for a joyride.

In fact, they only get reunited when a good girl scientist smuggles Miko out of NASA in a laundry basket and has good guy scientist Dr. Harvey fly him to Africa where he magically lands with Miko in the helicopter at the exact location where Nukie is standing around with his otherworldly thumb still figuratively up his ass!

The less thoughtful viewer might be prone to dismiss all of this as incompetent scripting and/or a story that was pretty much made up as it was filmed. But what if what Nukie was about, wasn’t so much Nukie trying to find his way home, but about everyone else trying do so?

The twins are aliens in their own village. Where do they belong? How do they get there? Surviving the snake bite and being rescued after getting lost with Nukie causes a search party to be formed for them showing that people really do care for them! Or at least feel a little guilty.

And what about all those NASA fruitcakes? The administrator is fairly apathetic about what is happening. Horrible experiments on Miko? Whatever. The NASA computer becoming self aware? You don’t say?  But once the computer causes him to remember his dream to be a clown he becomes much happier and eventually resigns, presumably to put on oversized floppy shoes and ride around in tiny cars. The evil scientist? Proving everyone gets what suits them most, she becomes the administrator! What about Dr. Harvey and the nice lady scientist who secretly pines for him? That is strangely never addressed. Perhaps one day we will see a director’s cut that adds a few more hours of drama to flesh the rest of it out!

Yes, if you expect this to be something along the lines of E.T., Nukie will be a very painful experience. Very very painful. Like more painful than all those injections that Miko got. Like maybe the beer inexplicably in the NASA break room weren’t props, but critical to the cast and crew’s sanity.

But as a character study of the human condition, Nukie tells us that maybe extraordinary circumstances can do more than threaten to break us, instead bringing out the person deep inside, re-orienting us to who we can truly be. Like the drunken shop keeper who sobers up just enough to realize what a great business opportunity it would be if he could capture Nukie to sell him to the highest bidder!

By the time Nukie and Miko are back together and take the talking chimp Nukie met in the village back to space with them, you realize what a deliriously crazy journey it all is. Just like our real lives. And if the haters want to crap all over it and continue to live small, unremarkable lives, knock yourselves out, bruh. Me? I’ll be with Nukie, Miko and that diaper-wearing monkey always reaching for that next star!

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