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Do We Need More Alien Contact Films & Series?
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<blockquote data-quote="Snarf Zagyg" data-source="post: 9178176" data-attributes="member: 7023840"><p>As a general rule, all "alien encounter" stories tend to fall into one of three camps.</p><p></p><p>1. The aliens are friendly.</p><p></p><p>2. The aliens are hostile.</p><p></p><p>3. The aliens are ... alien. </p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>E.T.? Alien is friendly.</p><p>V? Alien is hostile (but appears friendly).</p><p>Arrival? Alien is alien.</p><p>Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Alien is friendly (but appears hostile).</p><p></p><p>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 <em>Arrival</em>, 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."</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Snarf Zagyg, post: 9178176, member: 7023840"] 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 [I]Arrival[/I], 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." [/QUOTE]
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