SciFi Summer 2012

Thanos.

Here we are in the weekend of the US launch of The Avengers, Men in Black 3 is still about three weeks out and Prometheus will follow soon after.

Alien Invasion. Mr. Thanos is your evolutionary cousin, one of the branches of humanity that was created by the Celestials about 5 million years ago. As an Eternal, Thanos might be expected to protect Earth against the Deviants, but some how his mother was unable to pass the correct genes to him and so Thanos has some Deviant genes. Thanos is in love with Death, and is apparently involved with the alien invasion that forms the basis for The Avengers movie.

Men in Black 3

Is there any chance that future Marvel movies will expand on the exodemic-like plot elements of The Avengers (humans originated from the work of aliens who carried out genetic engineering on proto-human apes) or will those movies simply give us more conventional Hollywood good guys vs bad guys who run around blowing up things and each other?

Men in Black 3 has a time travel plot in which evil aliens must be thwarted. Apparently there are some interesting constraints on time travel such as a 24 hour limit when going back in time. I wonder if there will be any attempt to explain who gets to travel through time and for what purpose or if this will just be yet another example of someone in Hollywood saying, "we wanted to have a story back in the past so we just did it." In the Exodemic Fictional Universe the Huaoshy control all time travel and they only use it for special problems that arise on primitive planets.

Star map.

Last Summer I was titillated by the possibility that Hollywood might be catching on to the possibility of making movies about sneaky extraterrestrial visitors to Earth who would be here for reasons other than those depicted in typical alien invasion movies. I had high hopes for Prometheus, but it looks like little more than a re-do of Alien. Possibly a miracle will occur and there will be some explanation for how it was possible for "ancient astronauts" to leave a "calling card" (a star map) on Earth and then have nothing to do with Earth for thousands of years.

So there we have it, three Summer SciFi movies for 2012 that will be scooping up hundreds of millions of dollars, and all three of these movies had/have a chance to tell us something interesting about alien visitors to Earth. So far, The Avengers only has an evil dude using mind control to launch an alien invasion of Earth. Of course, the good guys beat back the attack....leaving room for the next movie in the $erie$.

Alien life from Prometheus.

Two chances remain for something interesting to slip out of Hollywood this Summer, but I'm not holding my breath for anything but more of the same tired old $tuff from Prometheus and Men in Black 3.

Here is my best-case scenario for Prometheus: maybe the aliens (for lack of a better name I'll call them the Slime Masters) who long ago visited Earth, have spent the past several thousand years developing their own entertainment industry. Fascinated by their own horror movies, the Slime Masters abandoned space travel and devoted all their creative energies to a genetics program resulting in the creation of armies of slime-dripping alien creatures that are good for thousands of years of Hollywood-type horror movies. When the Prometheus arrives at the home world of the Slime Masters, the aliens recognize a great marketing opportunity and rush back to Earth to license their slime-dripping creatures for use as props in Hollywood. To their great dismay, they realize that Hollywood has its own armies, thousands of geeky CGI programmers who do nothing but dream up new monsters for Hollywood productions. Dismayed and demoralized, the Slime Masters go back to a time (1975) when they can sell their slimy creatures to the highest bidder...resulting in the inspiration for the original Alien movie. Writers for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Forbes will write long articles about the deep significance of Prometheus as social commentary about capitalism. The movie will become required part of business school curricula across the country. The Occupy Movement will make use of the slime-dripping aliens of Prometheus as icons of the super rich.

Have a nice Summer!

This (above) is the first of a series of blog posts about my Search for Interesting Hollywood Aliens (SIHA). Here are links to the other SIHA 2012 blog posts:
Disney and Entertainment and Science Fiction, Oh My!
Horror, Comedy and SciFi in the Woods?
Aliens in Drag
Ancient Aliens
The exciting conclusion to the 2012 Search for Interesting Hollywood Aliens
Promethean Rorschach Test

Aliens and Hollywood

Even before I realized that that there were science fiction novels, I had read Chariots of the Gods? by Erich von Däniken. The only thing I took away from "ancient astronaut" theory was an appreciation for the idea that if an alien visitor came to Earth, chances are good that such a visitor would have been here long ago. Much longer ago than 1873.

I've looked at some online reviews of Cowboys & Aliens (funny). Apparently Ella Swenson is a visitor to Earth who takes on human form. My favorite science fiction plot element involves visitors to Earth who walk among us and never reveal the truth about their origins. I have not seen Cowboys & Aliens so all I can do is guess: maybe Ella is on Earth trying to give humans a helping hand against the Evil Invading Aliens.


it’s like Favreau’s sitting behind the camera chewing his fingernails going “just speed everything up so no one notices nothing makes any sense.”

When I finally discovered science fiction novels I got bounced around between conventional space opera stories such as The Skylark of Space and conventional SciFi movies such as War of the Worlds. It is fun to imagine the heroic Earthling who builds a spaceship and takes off on a great adventure in space, but the other option, which seems to be more popular, is to twist the plot so that the aliens come to Earth. I think I had my fill of Evil Alien Invaders the first time I saw War of the Worlds.

the inevitable, "I need to get to the heart of the alien craft, where the inevitable weakness is, to set off the bomb!" set-up

I was thrilled to eventually discover that some science fiction authors such as Arthur C. Clarke actually wrote stories (example) about space-traveling visitors who came to Earth millions of years ago. I quickly grew tired of science fiction stories where 1) the entire universe was out there just waiting for tool-using apes from Earth or 2) aliens came from hundreds of light-years away just to participate in a World War II-type space battle with heroic Earth-men. It is much more fun to explore other kinds of interactions with aliens. As far as I can tell, C&A is built around the idea that the aliens came to Earth for gold. Is this an attempt to get us to think about idiotic human motives for violence?

“Well, that is ridiculous! What are they going to do—buy something?”

Avatar turned the Evil Invader plot around, making humans the invaders. Some SciFi films such as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (I've never managed to watch it) do avoid the usual Hollywood SciFi plots of Evil Aliens and Space War. I have watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but for me it is as big a frustration as Contact, movies that end just when they should be moving on to tell us something interesting about the aliens and their advanced civilization. Sadly, I have no expectation that C&A includes interesting speculation about an alien civilization.

"If you’ve seen any alien invasion movie since Independence Day, you know these aliens."

Why is Hollywood dominated by people who think that a science fiction movie must have slime-dripping aliens and laser battles? I now have my hopes up because it sounds like there might be two types of aliens in Cowboys & Aliens, the comic book aliens from the original story and Ella Swenson who is apparently an alien of a different color. I'm tempted to write a spoof of Mars Attacks! in which aliens invade Hollywood and start making interesting science fiction movies. I wonder if Ron Howard and Olivia Wilde would be willing to deploy the Ella Swenson character as part of such a worthy effort to improve the SciFi film genre.

Stagecoach Indian Battle

SIHA 2016

When did Americans grow tired of movies in which endless streams of Native Americans were shot by "heroic" white men? When will people grow tired of endless movies where aliens are the designated target for mindless violence? Can't we have SciFi films with interesting stories about aliens who do something besides invade Earth?

Note. I'm still waiting for a movie based on Asimov's The End of Eternity. Maybe Olivia Wilde could play the role of Noÿs Lambent.

Note. This is post #100 for this blog! 200th

Search for Interesting Hollywood Aliens (annual SIHA awards)