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SALT LAKE CITY — Alien invasion flicks have become a major part of every summer movie season.
Including “The Avengers,” this summer alone will see the release of at least six films involving aliens — mostly ones maliciously bent on taking over our beautiful planet.
In terms of tone, the film industry’s new and upcoming extraterrestrial encounters run the gamut from comedy (“Men in Black III,”“The Watch”) to horror (“Prometheus”) to romance (“Extraterrestrial”) and, of course, as in the case of this past weekend’s big release of “Battleship,” action, too.
Commenting on the huge popularity of aliens in Hollywood, Seth Shostak, senior astronomer for the SETI Institute (an acronym for the “Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence”) and a member of the Science and Entertainment Exchange who has devoted his career to discovering signs of extraterrestrial life, matter-of- factly remarked, “Aliens make handy bad guys. Ever since the Soviet Union collapsed, you have a problem …. Who’s going to be the bad guy? You can make the aliens as bad as you want, and nobody ever complains.”
Universal’s “Battleship,” a film on which Shostak served as a scientific consultant, is a good example of this. Although extraterrestrials have little to do with the Milton Bradley board game that the movie alleges to be based on, the alternative would have been to villainize a specific country. Anyone familiar with the recent “Red Dawn” remake knows just how bad an idea that can be.There’s probably more to the public fascination with alien movies than just the need for really hateable bad guys, though. As Shostak mentions, “Science news items prompt people to think about these things … and that seeps into the movies.”
“Battleship,” for example, makes use of arguably the biggest story in astronomy right now: NASA’s Kepler Mission and the hunt for habitable planets outside our solar system. In “Battleship,” the alien invasion comes in direct response to a signal we supposedly beamed to one of these Earth-like planets back in 2005.
This prompts the question, though, would an alien species actually be hostile? Well, the concrete information we have on alien behavior is, as of right now, zilch.
If (the aliens) have the capacity for interstellar travel, it would be like the Roman army taking on the (modern) U.S. army — the Romans would have fun, but not for very long.
–Seth Shostak, SETI Institute
“If you look around at humans,” Shostak says, “most humans are not particularly hostile. Darwinian evolution makes sure that hostility is not extraordinarily widespread. But for a small fraction of a population, (aggressive or violent behavior) pays off. If you look at the historical record, it’s often the hostile ones that come visit you — the friendly ones are staying at home singing ‘Cumbaya’ in Klingon.”
In other words, alien invasion movies could actually be right on that front.
For what it’s worth, in his book “A Brief History of Time,” the renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking cautioned against trying to make our presence known in the universe for basically the reasons you see play out in movies like “Battleship.” The only difference is that the idea that humans could even begin to fight back is totally faulty. “If (the aliens) have the capacity for interstellar travel,” Shostak points out, “it would be like the Roman army taking on the (modern) U.S. army — the Romans would have fun, but not for very long.”
Of course, “Battleship” — not unlike every other Hollywood movie having to do with aliens — is full of pretty egregious scientific errors. For instance, how did the aliens make it to Earth so quickly after having just received our signal in 2005? As Shostak notes, without the ability to travel faster than the speed of light, that kind of trip would probably take closer to a thousand years.
Major inaccuracies, though, shouldn’t ruin a summer movie experience like “Battleship.”
When asked what his personal favorite alien invasion movie is, Shostak named two — the original 1953 “War of the Worlds” and “Forbidden Planet” from 1956. Neither one is particularly rooted in hard science, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t influence a generation of scientists.
More information about the SETI Institute and the scientific search for extraterrestrial life can be found on their website at www.seti.org.
A native of Utah Valley and a devoted cinephile, Jeff Peterson is studying humanities and history at Brigham Young University.
