Wiki Fiction: 2001 Space Aliens

May 1, 2019

2001 Space Aliens

Stranded, winner of the
2001 Retro-SIHA Award

As mentioned in this recent blog post, I have increasingly been looking to foreign (non-U.S.A.) sources for interesting science fiction about space aliens.

Martian: War of the Worlds

Sadly, in the English speaking world, The War of the Worlds set the tone for science fiction stories about space aliens. There have been endless stories about Martians who are assumed to breath air like we Earthlings.

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An entire branch of fantasy literature grew up around the idea humans could travel to Mars and live on its surface, breathing the air of Mars and getting to know the native residents of Mars.

Somewhat more realistic, stories such as Born under Mars by John Brunner, depicted human immigrants as the first Martians. Brunner's human visitors to Mars had to live inside heated, pressurized communities.

Dejah Thoris

The 2015 film The Martian was marketed as depicting a realistic account of human visitors on Mars, but there seems to be a rule in Hollywood requiring that any film about Mars degenerate into absurdity. I recently saw the wind storm scene at the start of The Martian (on television) and could only shake my head in dismay. 👎

Stranded

Valles Marineris scene from Stranded.

What about the 2001 film, Stranded? Did it manage to depict a believable adventure of human visitors on Mars (trailer)? Stranded was constructed around the idea that there might be remnants of an ancient Martian civilization at the bottom of Valles Marineris.

To Mars in the year 2020

Martian city in the canyon.

Crew members from the first manned mission to Mars discover that there is an ancient city in Valles Marineris. After their landing vehicle crashes near Valles Marineris, the Earthlings face the prospect of running out of oxygen to breath.

tunnel entrances in the canyon wall

The abandoned Martian city includes tunnels in the wall of the Valles Marineris canyon that look something like canyon dwellings of native Americans in the Southwest. Inside some of the tunnels and at the bottom of the canyon there is breathable air. There is also liquid water and some living plant-like organisms. The film ends without revealing the ultimate fate of the stranded Earthlings. Will they be able to survive on Mars, living like shipwreck survivors on an ocean island of Earth? Some of the Martian tunnels are lit by electric lights. What is the ancient source of power? Are there unseen alien devices that continue to collect and concentrate oxygen in the Martian city?

inside a Martian tunnel

Maybe the plan was to have a sequel film for Stranded that would have answered some of these questions, but the film-maker really could have explored these issues in just one 90 minute film. The first hour of Stranded is twice as long as it should have been, leaving only the final 30 minutes of the film for a quick stroll through some tunnels of the Martian city.

a Martian

The film would have been much better had it begun sensibly with a mission designed to explore the city ruins after they had first been photographed from orbit. The Martians themselves are only seen briefly in the film, as decayed and mummified corpses. Annoyingly, the film keeps shifting back and forth between normal video and low-resolution video that is supposedly being captured by the crew. The remains of the Martians are only seen in low-resolution. I suppose the special effects budget for this film did not allow for non-laughter-inducing high-resolution images of the Martians.

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The brief on-screen glimpses of these Martians remind me of the 1960s Star Trek episode (The Corbomite Maneuver) in which a silly puppet is used to represent an alien humanoid.

Maria de Medeiros

For fans of stories about space aliens, my advice is to watch the last 30 minutes of Stranded. Skipping the first hour of the film, you will still catch
1) the obligatory Sci Fi nubile (Maria de Medeiros) in her underwear scene
and
2) the discovery of the Martian city at the bottom of Valles Marineris.

The dead Martian society.

Additional advice: watch Stranded with the sound off. Much of the dialog is painfully mundane and nobody has anything useful to say anyhow. Also, by avoiding the first hour of the movie, you will reduce your exposure to what is supposed to be 2020 technology that unfortunately looks like 1970s space shuttle technology.

After you watch the last 30 minutes of Stranded, you can then have the fun of imagining for yourself how another movie might have been made that told us something interesting about the Martians.

Adventure Movies

sunken Atlantis

Stranded reminds me of one of the first movies I ever saw, Journey to the Center of the Earth. In that film, the remnants of Atlantis are found, having sunken deep inside the Earth. For a five-year-old, such adventure stories are fun and young children need not worry about the fact that they depict impossibilities such as finding live dinosaurs and a well-lit city of Atlantis deep inside the Earth. For adults living now, in an era after decades of robotic exploration of the surface of Mars, science fiction movie fans should be able to expect Hollywood to provide realistic depictions of conditions on Mars.

gigantic Krell technology

I wish Stranded had shown us some fantastic alien technology as was done in Forbidden Planet. It would be interesting to see the screenplay for Stranded. Once inside the maze-like tunnel system of the Martians, there are strange symbols on the walls. Some of those symbols apparently indicate which of the tunnels are pressurized with air.

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Strangely, inside the Martian city that is shown to viewers of Stranded, there is nothing as mundane as doors to separate the pressurized tunnels from the unpressurized ones. The screenplay for Stranded was written by Juan Miguel Aguilera, a published historical fiction and science fiction author. I've never read any of Aguilera's published stories, but I've seen him described as a hard science fiction writer. I have to believe that in the original story for Stranded, there was some discussion of the Martian technology that held oxygen inside the tunnels of the Valles Marineris city. In the film, there seem to be invisible molecular screens that can contain a warm, pressurized atmosphere while humans can walk right through those molecular barriers.

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Could humanoid life have evolved on Mars? A billion years ago, there may have been more liquid water on Mars, but so far we have no evidence that multi-cellular creatures ever existed on Mars. If you are the type of science fiction story teller who enjoys time travel, then stories can be crafted in which humans of the far future travel back in time and colonize Mars during its wetter era of the far past.

For an alternate version of Stranded, rather than suggest that the Martian city had been created by natives or time traveling humans, it might have been fun to suggest that millions of years previously aliens from another star system had reached Mars and established a colony. The story could have raised the possibility that the aliens had guided the evolution of humans on Earth and then, having completed that task, the aliens moved on, abandoning their Martian base.

Perhaps these space aliens could have been artificial lifeforms, designed to survive a long, slow trip between the stars. Perhaps some remnant of such an artificial lifeform could have remained on Mars, waiting to welcome explorers from Earth when they finally develop the required technology to travel through outer space and travel to Mars.