Do We Need More Alien Contact Films & Series?

[Snarf Zagyg]

As a general rule, all "alien encounter" stories tend to fall into one of three camps.

1. The aliens are friendly.

2. The aliens are hostile.

3. The aliens are ... alien.

Once you understand that these are the three basic tropes, you see that every movie is either the trope straight up, or a variation on it.

E.T.? Alien is friendly.
V? Alien is hostile (but appears friendly).
Arrival? Alien is alien.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Alien is friendly (but appears hostile).

etc. I would argue that the prevalence of these tropes generally map onto our generalized anxieties of "the other"- are they friend or foe? The third category (aliens are aliens) is the rarest, simply because it's hardest to pull off. It's genuinely difficult to have something that doesn't have recognizable human motivations or thought. At a certain point, even the "aliens are aliens" will often have shades of the other two ... even Arrival, which did a really good job with this, was arguably just a hard sci-fi version of the "aliens are friendly, we just don't understand them yet."

 

[BookTenTiger]

I would presume most of such are classified, and so aren't available to writers.



The problem with this is that human reaction will be all over the map. The course of events will depend on short-term things like, "Who is the charismatic leader who gets the public's ear?" And the author has to just choose those things. Then it becomes less "How would people behave?" and more "What story does the author want to tell?"

Well that's the fun of storytelling, right? If you can make the actions and decisions on screen seem logical and natural and not the whims of the author, you have achieved something great!

 

[Umbran]

Well that's the fun of storytelling, right? If you can make the actions and decisions on screen seem logical and natural and not the whims of the author, you have achieved something great!

Sure. I was responding to the "actually happen" bit.

My point is that authored fiction isn't a simulation. It isn't what would actually happen, any more than a comic book will tell you what would actually happen in a conflict between Batman and Superman. What happens is what the author wants to happen, whether they make it seem like it or not.

 

[Kaodi]

There must be significant stories where the aliens are heterogeneous too. Some are amicable, some are hostile, some are inexplicable, even within the same species. Aliens, like us, would likely have different subcultures amongst them. I think Star Trek is slowly getting better at this aspect of making variations within alien cultures we have long been familiar with. Whomever we make contact with first might be institutionally their "best foot forward" but not necessarily the most representative of their species.

 

[Ryujin]

As a general rule, all "alien encounter" stories tend to fall into one of three camps.

1. The aliens are friendly.

2. The aliens are hostile.

3. The aliens are ... alien.

Once you understand that these are the three basic tropes, you see that every movie is either the trope straight up, or a variation on it.

E.T.? Alien is friendly.
V? Alien is hostile (but appears friendly).
Arrival? Alien is alien.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Alien is friendly (but appears hostile).

etc. I would argue that the prevalence of these tropes generally map onto our generalized anxieties of "the other"- are they friend or foe? The third category (aliens are aliens) is the rarest, simply because it's hardest to pull off. It's genuinely difficult to have something that doesn't have recognizable human motivations or thought. At a certain point, even the "aliens are aliens" will often have shades of the other two ... even Arrival, which did a really good job with this, was arguably just a hard sci-fi version of the "aliens are friendly, we just don't understand them yet."

I don't think that we get nearly enough "Alien is Alien" movies. The two that come to mind are "Contact" and "Arrival." And "Contact" also loosely falls into the "Alien is Friendly" group. I wold like to see adaptations of things like "A Fire Upon the Deep", "The Mote in God's Eye", "The Hercules Text" (though the aliens don't actually appear in that one, just their message). Even something like "Footfall" that's alien invasion, but of a species that has different priorities than we do, would be interesting. Why do the invading aliens always seem to have pretty much the same goals that we do, but just have bigger whacking sticks?

 

[payn]

They have all 7 seasons of The Outer Limits from the 90's on Amazon prime!

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

First contact stories don’t have to be present day or near future:

1) In 2008, there was the movie Outlander, in which a humanoid alien helps fight another alien in the Viking era.

2) we had the epic Twilight Zone episode in which American space explorers are the “little green men” on a planet populated by giant humanoids.

3) in one of my own homebrews, the fey of Underhill are actually crashlanded alien Grays who use high tech- holography, stasis, extra dimensional construction, etc.- to live among the inhabitants of a fantasy setting.

So we could easily have adaptations of things like A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court reshaped into First Contact stories.

Leonardo Da Vinci and other inventors could be portrayed as aliens hiding among us. So could certain serial killers, a la Predator.

 

[Rabulias]

First contact stories don’t have to be present day or near future:

And who can forget the 2011 film Cowboys & Aliens?

 

[payn]

And who can forget the 2011 film Cowboys & Aliens?

I think you mean who can remember.

 

[Ryujin]

I think you mean who can remember.

Aliens... something... something... OLIVIA WILDE!