🎬 #171 Depictions of Alien.
This week, I'm going to talk about two films that depict what an alien race might be like. One portrays them as scary, villainous and threatening, while the other depicts them as very child-like, innocent, and wondrous. One of the films this week is based on a true story or a supposedly true story, and the other is a work of fiction.
As a human filmmaker trying to imagine what another, completely different, species from us would be like is probably one of the most difficult things to imagine in film. To be truly alien, you have to not think from a human mind. I think that's why both of the films this week, although they're depicting aliens, come at it from a very human standpoint. One of them obviously veers towards the negative, and one veers towards the positive. The capacity for humans to be kind and embrace the unknown is reflected in one film, and the capacity for humans to capture and torture and inflict pain is depicted in the other. It’s very difficult to actually come at this problem from a truly alien standpoint.
I hope you enjoy this week's choices and have a wonderful weekend.
Happy choosing, happy viewing
Bry
FILM ONE: FIRE IN THE SKY
1993 Dir Robert Lieberman
1 hr 49 mins
Much like the film "Communion," this is one of those films from my childhood which really gave me nightmares. It was probably on television when I first saw it, probably Channel 4 late at night. Most of the film is a slow build-up, and it wraps the story in this who-done-it structure where we, the audience, are teased about the facts throughout. Whether or not this is all some kind of big hoax played by the other members of the logging party, or if they actually killed Travis Walton (the lead character's name), is debated throughout the film.
We're treated to this debate for the first hour or so of the film, and then we're thrust into Travis Walton's memory of the event and what happened in the 5 days that he was missing. Up until this point, we're given snippets of his memories which are conjured up by parallel or similar events in his normal daily life (now that he's returned). Things that trigger different aspects of a memory (e.g., being taken through a hospital gives him flashes of being on an examination table in a spacecraft, or the feeling of a condiment dripping in his mouth reminds him of a biological substance in his mouth when he wakes up in the spaceship).
Once we're into his full memory, that's when the aliens are really depicted as unfeeling and well - horror characters. It's more of a science fiction horror sequence once he's on board the ship. There were hints of this more horror-villainous slant even from the reddishness of the light from the craft and the low hum threatening signs from the ship when they first see it through the trees. Once we're on board the ship with Travis, it's rendered as a very organic, almost medieval in some ways. The textures are very stone, a very cave-like, rudimentary feel. Even the tools and instruments that they use on him are steampunk-ish - they're metal, they're rusty, nothing looks clean, it all looks very lived-in, lived-in by these strange alien characters.
It's quite an extended, quite an intense sequence, especially for probably an 8-10 year old at the time to see it. I think because of the slowness and because of the prosaic-ness of the lead-up to it, it strikes the viewer as more powerful in the context of the rest of the film. What's also a really nice choice - shown in the frame above - is that the filmmakers play with the classic depiction of an alien that almost everyone recognises at this point. The classic black, oversized eyes, almond-shaped eyes, the grey skin, the featureless face. They play with this by showing that this is in fact their equivalent of a spacesuit. A nice twist on a classic image and it's one that wrong foots both Travis and the audience when they see it for the first time. When he comes across those suits, he believes it's the things that took him. What's also really impressive upon having watched the sequence again is the creation of the low-gravity effects—because it's not the classic zero-g look; it feels more unusual than that, which again adds to this otherworldly atmosphere.
What's also interesting is that despite the fact that this is a very horrific sequence and the aliens are depicted as the villains in this horror, the real Travis Walton, whose story the film is based on, has since come out and said that none of that was true in terms of how it was depicted in the film.
In fact, he says quite the opposite - according to him, when he wakes up on the ship, there were not the ‘horror’ characters depicted in the film. Instead, when he stood up, they backed away from him; they were scared and there was no sense of a threat. They attempted to calm him down or that was the impression he got. In fact, he said that they took him to heal him. His theory is that because he approached the craft, some kind of energy discharge hit him, and the only reason they took him was to repair the damage.
It's just quite interesting that his interpretation veers quite dramatically from the filmmaker's. But still, even with this other interpretation in mind, my advice is don’t watch before bed time.
*Available for a small rental fee on Apple and Amazon in the US and Amazon in the UK.
Fact: William Friedkin was a big fan of the film.
FILM TWO: CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND
1977 Dir Steven Spielberg
2 hrs 18 mins
Now, to the total opposite of the depiction of the first film, we’ve got Steven Spielberg’s classic which, when you think of it, is really about a man who leaves his family. So, a story about a close encounter is really about Speilberg’s own father leaving when he was a kid and having to come to terms with that.
This is a depiction of a character who becomes obsessed after witnessing something extraordinary. Richard Dreyfuss does an incredible job of bringing that mindset to life - someone who one day was living a normal life and then the next day, is on a totally different quest - hungry for answers to something he can’t ever have imagined before.
In total contrast to the film above, these are alien visitors that you'd be happy to go with. And so, when the big moment finally arrives, we're confronted not with the aliens but in a masterful choice by Spielberg and the filmmakers, we see other humans come out of the craft, first brightly back-lit so that their silhouettes appear alien, but once they’re beyond the light we see that they're clearly human, but humans from another era. These are the crewmen from aircraft that have vanished and have now been returned. It's only after that initial wave of people are released, do we then see this myriad of different beings who appear to be different types of aliens, from tall to small, and yet all of them appear very gentle - very playful. Curious as to this planet and its inhabitants. It's a very magical and numinous sequence that is still awe-inspiring. This is the type of encounter that you would like to hope happens if we are confronted with an alien civilisation on our home turf one day.
As I mentioned a bit in the intro, to be able to think outside of a human's experience and depict an alien civilisation or imagine what an alien civilisation or alien characters to be like is impossible as a human filmmaker. However, I think that one film in particular that really succeeds in trying to imagine something totally different from us and totally unmotivated by human characteristics or human thinking is Alex Garland's adaptation of the book Annihilation. I think that is very close to something truly alien, something truly unknowable as a human.
*Available for a small rental fee on Apple and Amazon in the US and UK.
Fact: Paul Schrader wrote the original draft of the script.