I write science fiction. A lot of my stories have alien beings in them. I like to think I'm pretty good at creating aliens and alien civilizations.
Which is why I am developing an irresistible urge to drive out to California and shout at every screenwriter who has used aliens in a film during the past couple of decades. For some reason, aliens in cinema have become the all-purpose excuse for lazy writing and slapdash plots.
The failings of movie aliens fall into two main categories: motives and methods. Nearly every cinematic alien in recent years has completely nonsensical motives for doing what they do.
Battleship is actually one of the least bad offenders in this particular respect. The bad guys at least have a comprehensible motive: they apparently want to conquer the Earth. And they seem to be at least moderately suited for living on our planet -- they're nocturnal, but the Sun is down as often as it's up, and they appear to be amphibious.
Contrast the aliens in Signs, who turn out to be harmed by contact with water, which sucks for them because Earth is covered with water and its living things are basically made of the stuff. Why the hell would they want to come here?
Or the aliens in the otherwise enjoyable Cowboys and Aliens, who are on Earth to mine gold. Even the characters in the movie find this motive ridiculous when it's explained to them. When fictional characters start critiquing your writing, you should go back and revise what you've done.
Or, stupidest of all, the bad guys in Battle: Los Angeles, who are here to steal our water. This is a howler which would have been barely excusable in 1961, but in 2011 we know that water is common in the Universe, and it would take about five minutes with Google for a screenwriter to find out that fact.
I'm not saying movie aliens should act just like humans. In fact, I'd love to see a movie alien with genuinely alien motivations. But alien motivations aren't the same as stupid motivations. The extraterrestrial big-game hunter in the 1987 Arnold Schwartzenegger action picture Predator was a fine example: it was here to hunt humans. It's weird, but it's not stupid.
And when they're not invading Earth for stupid reasons, the aliens seem to do it in stupid ways. I know why this happens: screenwriters have to build up the aliens as a big, powerful, scary threat, but they also have to build in an Achilles Heel to enable the humans to ultimately defeat them. Unfortunately, they tend to do this by making the aliens do blatantly stupid things, and then justify it by saying "Hey, they're aliens!"
In the case of methods, the bad guys from Battleship are among the worst I've seen. They're totally inconsistent and, frankly, stupid. In personal combat they insist on attacking people with knives, like a pack of Assyrian soldiers from Sennacherib's army. A company of longbowmen could handle them pretty roughly. In naval enagements they are completely innocent of air power or gunnery, but insist on attacking by lobbing some kind of giant robot buzz-saws at things. (Said buzz-saws can chew through warship hulls at the speed of a running sailor, but can apparently be blasted into harmless puffs of vapor by a few rounds from an airplane's cannon.)
Most startling, they are capable of surrounding the entire state of Hawaii in an impenetrable forcefield dome, but don't bother using any similar protection on their spaceship gunboat things. At one point the heroes shoot out a window on the spaceship with rifles!
Everything they do is determined by what the moviemakers thought would look cool and scary, rather than what would actually be effective. The audience is apparently supposed to be so dumb we think a giant buzzsaw is a more deadly weapon than a dinky little cruise missile.
There's one other complaint I have about cinematic aliens: their appearance. For sixty years now, visitors from other worlds in movies have been humanoids. Two legs, two arms, a head on top, proably two eyes with a mouth underneath them.
People, in other words. People who wear funny clothes and may have funny rubber prosthetic appliances on their foreheads.
Why? In written fiction, H.G. Wells had blobby tentacled Martians driving big tripods invading south England in 1898! We've had freaky weird-shaped aliens for more than a century in science fiction novels and stories, but cinema clings to the human form with limpet-like tenacity.
This was excusable in 1953, or even 1987, when your aliens ultimately had to be built around an actor or stuntman. But in the age of computer animation (when every spaceship in a sci-fi movie is an eye-straining mass of shifting pieces and fiddly bits) it's practically a crime. Where are the giant bugs? Where are the squids? Heck, just give me some centauroid aliens or some guys with three legs. I can't quite blame the writers for this, because of course production designers and costumers bear a lot of the responsibility.
I think it comes back to my perennial problem with moviemakers. They think we're stupid. They think audiences can't recognize a non-humanoid creature as intelligent. They think audiences won't think about why the alien villains are doing the things they do. I don't know how to fix this problem. But I do wish some moviemaker would take a chance and make a movie with believable aliens -- he might be surprised by how well it works out. It just so happens I've got some stories with aliens . . .
There should be aliens who look like limpets.
Posted by: Chuk | 04/18/2013 at 04:11 PM