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Encountering ETs in the movies: friends and foes
A brief orbit around the contrasting ways cinema has portrayed extraterrestrials since the 1950s
It’s fascinating to look at how cinema, our most popular art form, has portrayed extraterrestrials over the decades, reflecting fears — and hopes — in the world at large.
My view is that any detailed discussion of intelligent non-human lifeforms, apart from the scientific question of whether they can or do exist, has usually been offered by fiction and film.
Of the thirty or so individual movies and franchises I shall be mentioning here, about a third were based on a novel, a novella or a short story, although that doesn’t mean that the fictional narratives were followed faithfully when it came to making the films.
However, a fictional work might predate a film by many years, sometimes decades, suggesting, especially in the case of science fiction, that ideas about ETs presented in a movie drawn from, say, a novel, could have been latent for a very long time, and even outright prophetic.
How should the discovery of life beyond Earth be announced to the world? Only last week, NASA called for a new scientific framework to be drawn up for the reporting of evidence for extraterrestrial life (Nature, October 27, 2021), on the basis that our generation could…
