Post by Laurance on Nov 14, 2010 18:35:02 GMT 1
As Skyline premiered on Friday, I thought I would look for some reviews on it, and came across this article. It isn't meant to be serious, but thought it light-hearted and thought provoking (To a certain degree).
With few exceptions, Hollywood seems to believe that aliens arriving on Earth would be awful. As evidenced in this week’s Skyline and other alien invasion flicks, we’d experience a siege on our way of life that would end with widespread death and destruction, but not before there were some really cool battles between our technology and theirs. (How we always prevail, we’ll never know, since our extraterrestrial foes have clearly mastered interstellar travel, while the only heavenly body we’ve successfully conquered is our own, uninhabited moon.) But if you really think about it, even some of the worst-case alien invasion scenarios could actually be of amazing benefit to humankind, not the least of which because they often inspire some totally memorable Will Smith one-liners. As such, we’ve compiled a short list of movie-based reasons why an alien encounter could be pretty freaking sweet if it happened in real life. And, sure, it would seem like things don’t always turn out well for the aliens, but you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, right? They’re just acting as the universe’s version of social media. Based on Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Contact, it would appear that extraterrestrials have little interest in becoming our alien overlords; they just want to say “What up?” It’s possible they’re like the party planners of the universe, going around and giving everyone nametags, offering punch to wallflowers and suggesting other species that we might have things in common with. They’re giving us new technology. Also in Contact, as well as in The Man Who Fell to Earth, these creatures come bearing gifts. Sure, maybe we neither need nor want a teleportation device so gigantic it’s visible from space (as in the former), or we may repay their generosity by sapping their will to return to their home planet (as in the latter). But the important thing is how we benefit from their arrival, and quite frankly, even if the machine they send us looks like a companion piece to EPCOT Center’s Spaceship Earth, if it will give us a few extra minutes to snooze in the morning before dashing off to work then it’s worth it. They’re here to teach us some important lessons. If there’s one thing visitors from space seem to do most often in the movies, it’s provide a living metaphor about tolerance, understanding and self-improvement. In E.T., all that little deformed potato-boy wanted was to collect a few flowers and make friends with a kid from a broken home. In District 9, all the extraterrestrial lobsters sought was a safe, prejudice-free place to live. Thank goodness these stories automatically fit into a three-act structure, because after we almost destroy such valuable interplanetary beacons of self-awareness, we inevitably learn to respect their coexistence. Sadly, it is a shame that there are no relevant earthbound examples of intolerance to which we can apply this newfound insight. They’re inadvertently offering us emotional validation/catharsis. Because aliens often adopt the form of a person who is familiar to others, it’s entirely possible that they might help folks get through tough times. In Starman, for example, Karen Allen’s character is initially nonplused to discover that her deceased husband is back and claims to be from outer space, but damn if she doesn’t fall for him all over again and eventually come to terms with his original death. Meanwhile, in Galaxy Quest, Tim Allen’s floundering former TV star finds the personal and professional validation he desperately needs after discovering that his long-canceled Star Trek-esque series has inspired an entire race of aliens to aspire to the heroism his character regularly displayed. They’re here to protect us from more dangerous forces – including other aliens. Superman is perhaps the best example of an otherworldly creature that puts aside his personal ambitions (like, why doesn’t that dude get a girlfriend?) in order to serve mankind, but in Dreamcatcher, an alien (Donnie Wahlberg) disguises himself as a Scooby-Doo-quoting retard (seriously) while lying in wait until another species of aliens decides to wipe out all of humanity. And in Transformers, the Autobots came to Earth to find a new place to live, only to discover that they have to put their dreams of a two-car garage on hold to stop the Decepticons from turning the human race into a human racetrack. They might be, like, really hot. If The Fifth Element and My Stepmother is an Alien are any indication, it’s entirely possible that these creatures aren’t some tentacle-waving weirdos but quite comely companions for lovelorn human beings. And even though in Species, Sil destroys each of her mates almost immediately after hooking up with them, it would almost be worth it if the last thing you saw before dying was something that looked like a naked Natasha Henstridge. They may hold the secret to our evolution. Looking through the annals of cinema, it seems like there is no more powerful story of the ability of aliens to rejuvenate humankind after it has succumbed to the ravages of age than Cocoon. Oh, sure, there’s that 2001: A Space Odyssey movie, where a giant alien domino is present at every epochal moment in mankind’s intellectual advancement, but who would ever be so stupid to believe that we evolved from apes? I mean, the only human with nearly as much hair as a primate is Robin Williams. (Although that does explain a few things about his role on Mork and Mindy…) Even if they did want to fight us, it would be a pretty cool battle. God knows that no one in their right mind would ever want to see the majority of humanity decimated by an extraterrestrial attack. But Roland Emmerich did, and he made a pretty entertaining movie as a result: Independence Day, which features some great action scenes, as well as a virtual bible of those Will Smith one-liners. But John McTiernan’s 1987 documentary Predator proves without dispute that on a one-to-one basis, human beings are by far the most dangerous game in the universe, especially if they are mud-covered Austrian seven-time Mr. Olympia winners with dubious English pronunciation and promising Hollywood careers ahead of them. |