The concept of first contact with extraterrestrial life has been a recurrent theme in 20th- and 21st-century science fiction. Will aliens look like us? Will they think like us? Will we be like children to them? Will they exhibit what our own race rather conceitedly labels “humanity”, or will they wrench this sublimely beautiful planet from our grasping hands and grind us mercilessly into the dust?
Denis Villeneuve’s latest film, Arrival, the first teaser trailer for which debuted this week, looks likely to take a new approach to the theme. When we do eventually meet aliens, how will we work out how to converse with them? Especially as Star Trek’s rather useful universal translator has not yet been invented.
The trailer introduces Amy Adams’ Dr Louise Banks, a language expert, mathematician Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) and military man Forest Whitaker (as Colonel Weber). The aliens have landed, or, more precisely, are hovering above the Earth in a monolithic ship and now await the humans who will be among the first to encounter extraterrestrial life.
If Villeneuve manages to successfully expand the conversation, his achievement will be up there with the moon landings. For while the promise of these films is that we’ll get to see what alien life might look like, how its societies might function and how that might affect mankind’s own future evolution (providing we are not exterminated), it’s rare that we ever get to see behind the conjuror’s curtain. And that means these “first contact” films are, on one vital level, always bound to disappoint.
Many film-makers get around the problem by deliberately keeping the details of extraterrestrial life pretty nebulous, while blinding us with smoke and mirrors. See 2001: A Space Odyssey’s black monoliths and floating orbs. The worst examples – I’m thinking the odious Jodie Foster vehicle Contact – have shown us almost nothing at all by the time the credits roll, their alien entities dressed sumptuously in the cosmic equivalent of the emperor’s new clothes.
Even when we do get to see the aliens, in movies such as Ridley Scott’s uber-portentous Prometheus or M Night Shyamalan’s Signs, we are conveniently told little or nothing about where they came from or what their motivations might have been. Film-makers take all our wonder and awe, but give us very little to show for it in return. And most of the time, especially if the movie has thrilled on other levels, we don’t even notice.
Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind is the textbook example here. We are so stupefied by all the flashing lights and music of the early scenes that by the time we get to see an alien up close, we’re ready to scream at the screen in astonishment. When Francois Truffaut uses sign language to communicate the movie’s famous five-note refrain, and the little green man signs back, corks are popping in every seat of the auditorium. And yet, the champagne turns out to be of an ersatz variety, for once again, the film has told us precisely nothing.
Even when alien movies fully succeed, they often do so by looking inwards rather than outwards. ET is Spielberg’s vision of how an evolved being might be manifest, as a symbiotic creature of infinite kindness, minimal ego and childlike curiosity. Big thinkers in ancient times had a similar idea and called it Jesus.
You would have to read ET’s companion novels (as I did as a child) to find out more about the alien’s own society. All we know from the movie is that the guy’s a proper dude, can survive on sugary confectionery, and likes plants a lot.
Then there’s Neill Blomkamp’s District 9, which gave us aliens based on the experience of the black underclass in apartheid-era South Africa. With such fascinating layers of allegory in place, no one bothered to complain that the details of the alien “prawn” society are thinly sketched.
Perhaps movies are simply too limited a form to fully explore such grandiose matters, leaving film-makers to dip their toes in the sea of possibility, rather than risk drowning by rushing headlong into the waves. We don’t know what alien life will look like, should it ever reach us, so film can only hope to play on our sense of wonder at the prospect of discovering we might not be alone in the cosmos. A glimpse of reality is all we are ever likely to see, and the most intelligent sci-fi film-makers know that will be more than enough to sate our appetites.
