It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine): The persistence of the alien invasion filmby Dwayne Day
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| By now there have been so many alien invasion movies and television shows that it is very difficult to produce anything original, except on the margins. |
Every time this happens, people speculate that the object is a spaceship, possibly part of an invasion fleet. Alien invasions have lurked below the surface of the American psyche for over seven decades now. And by total coincidence, on the same day that 3I/ATLAS received its designation, Apple TV+ released the trailer for the third season of its alien invasion show Invasion, which you have almost certainly never heard of, let alone watched. Invasion has all the characteristics of modern shows of its ilk: some clever ideas, uninspired execution including wobbly CGI, lots of screaming, and no idea where it is going or how the story will end. But it helps shine a light on how space is part of our culture, and our unease about it.
Here we go again, again
By now there have been so many alien invasion movies and television shows that it is very difficult to produce anything original, except on the margins. For several decades, alien invasion films and television shows were thinly disguised analogies for the communist threat. Over time, they have evolved to represent new themes and ideas. However, the alien invasion genre has often suffered from an inherent flaw in the premise: any alien species advanced enough to travel through space and take over the Earth is going to be too difficult for humans to defeat.
In H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, the author solved this by having germs kill the Martians. Some people have complained that the Martians should have been smart enough to protect themselves against viruses, but our recent pandemic has undermined that criticism. Numerous other stories have adopted a variation of that solution, most notably 1996’s Independence Day wiping out the aliens with a computer virus. Other stories have introduced other aliens who help the humans to defeat the invaders, although those aliens may not be all that friendly either. But the conundrum is always there: if the aliens are all-powerful, the humans are weak and ineffective, and the logical conclusion is that the best the humans can hope to do is survive, not win. It’s hard to make a positive ending with that premise.
Survival has been the theme of several recent alien invasion television shows. Falling Skies, which ran from 2011 to 2015, was about survivors of an invasion that had devastated much of the Earth. It was undermined by its often-cheap look, and some rather wacky story twists. Colony, which ran from 2016 to 2018, was about the few remaining humans living in Los Angeles (and eventually a few other cities), which had been walled in by aliens who were enslaving humans to build a weapon on the Moon. Even though both shows started with a logical assumption that the humans could not defeat the invaders, neither knew what to do with that premise other than to have the scrappy survivors keep on hiding and fleeing and occasionally fighting.
| One of the frustrating aspects of the show was that the invasion, and its aliens, barely appeared in a show about an alien invasion. |
Colony deserved more attention than it received. Obviously inspired by the early 1980s TV miniseries V, the show had some clever ideas of its own, such as the backstory that the aliens had been planning their invasion with the help of collaborators in senior government and military and corporate positions around the world for decades. Like V, which was inspired by the 1935 Sinclair Lewis novel It Can’t Happen Here, Colony was an analogy for fascism and the lengths to which people would collaborate, not only to save their own skin, but often gleefully to prosper in the new order, looking the other way as their neighbors disappeared. It occasionally delved into the murky world where accommodation merged over into collaboration, and posed the ugly question of whether resistance made any sense if it was almost certainly futile. The second season introduced a new twist, that the aliens were planning on using Earth to fight their enemies, who may have been worse than they were. After three seasons, the show was canceled. Star Josh Holloway later said that he had warned the producers: “I told them, You got to show an alien soon. There’s a reason there’s a shot clock in the NBA. People are impatient. Show an alien so we don’t get canceled! But we were a little late.”
Invasion premiered in October 2021 and also features the theme of incredibly powerful aliens. It also somewhat bizarrely did the same thing as Colony, keeping the aliens off-screen for much of the show. In Colony, the collaborating humans were at least proxies for the aliens. But in Invasion we didn’t get a decent look at an alien until the sixth episode of the first season, which was essentially an homage to the farmhouse scene from the 1953 (or 2005) movie The War of the Worlds, where an alien prowls around a rural house as its inhabitants try to hide. In early alien invasion movies, the aliens were usually people in rubber suits, but modern CGI allows designers to make them look weird. When we did get to see an alien in Invasion they were dark and amorphous, sort of like a big black trash bag with spikes—mysterious, but not a good design. One of the frustrating aspects of the show was that the invasion, and its aliens, barely appeared in a show about an alien invasion.
Instead, for its first season, Invasion followed around several characters and their cohorts who were scattered around the globe and seemed to be far away from the actual invasion. There was Trevante, a Navy SEAL in Afghanistan who was one of the first people to encounter the aliens, but it happened in a dust storm where he saw little as his team was wiped out. We also met Aneesha, a mother and wife living outside of New York City who fled with her family after an attack. There was Mitsuki Yamato, a flight controller for a Japanese space station mission whose girlfriend was apparently killed in space when an invisible alien craft collided with it. And finally, there was Casper Morrow, a British schoolboy who suffered epileptic seizures and had been bullied and ridiculed his whole life, whose bus went over a cliff in the wilderness while on a field trip. Frequently the mini-stories headed down blind alleys and then stopped, or promised things and failed to deliver: very few aliens, almost no action.
Watching a bunch of brooding people mope through an alien invasion we never got to see did not make for riveting television—light years away from Will Smith punching a monster in the face. It was hard to care about any of these people. They all demonstrated determination and strength that helped them to survive, but they just weren’t inspiring or interesting. The one exception was Casper, whose innate bravery and strength of character emerged as things get worse.
Invasion’s writers clearly decided that they wanted a slow-burn mystery rather than a rah-rah explosion-filled Independence Day-like action show. That’s obviously why they kept the aliens off-screen for so long. But as the show progressed, it became almost grating. Why were we following around these people, when much more exciting stuff was obviously happening elsewhere to more interesting and less damaged people? At least part of the answer was that anybody who encountered an alien quickly died. Bullets didn’t work against them, projectiles and fire didn’t work against them, they could regenerate from almost any damage. Our characters were alive primarily because they didn’t run into the aliens—until some of them did and then they died. But they remained clueless and uninvolved for so long that they appeared stupid.
Something that was hinted early on but was never fully resolved was the idea that some of these characters were somehow key to understanding and maybe defeating the aliens. Mitsuki was convinced that her girlfriend was not really dead, and her attempts to communicate with her in space enabled the American military to target the alien spaceship and nuke it, which conveniently resulted in all the aliens on Earth falling dead. Casper’s seizures resulted in him having visions of the invasion before it happened, and seeing events that he had no knowledge of, scenes that he recreated in a creepy notebook filled with scribbling. Somehow he could mentally connect with the aliens and see what they saw, possibly even controlling them.
All of this came to a head in the penultimate episode of the first season, which finally resulted in the aliens being defeated as their mostly-unseen giant ship is blasted in space. But there was a tenth episode, and anybody who has watched a few movies could see what was coming. One of the last scenes showed some scientists going into a crashed alien spaceship in the Amazon jungle. They shine their flashlights around and notice that something is moving behind the walls—no surprise, the aliens are not dead. The show then cuts to another character looking at a piece of alien stuff, and it starts to ripple on its surface, something we have seen happen before. It was a cliffhanger for a show that had struggled with suspense its entire season.
Bizarrely, Apple TV+ renewed the show for a second season. Apple is worth a trillion dollars. They can afford to throw away hundreds of millions on boring television and it won’t even show up on their spreadsheet. Season 2, which streamed from August to October 2023, improved a bit over the first season. It introduced some new ideas. Mitsuki managed to communicate with an alien, which did not go well. Other characters struggled to survive, discovering that sometimes even allies are not who they seem. By the end of the season, the show had gotten weirder, although the weirdness was not really a stand-in for cleverness, more like a bit of desperation. Now, even more surprisingly, we will get season 3 in August. Maybe this time humans will defeat the aliens. But don’t count on it.
All setup, no closure
Invasion’s weakness was not exactly unique. Most alien invasion shows today have this problem of too much premise, not enough resolution. If an alien race is so advanced as to be able to travel interstellar distances, then they are probably too advanced for humans to defeat them. Writers either have to cheat and give them a hidden weakness, or fumble through and hope the audience doesn’t notice the problem. In the 1980s, writer David Gerrold wrote several novels about an alien invasion, his War Against the Chtorr series. But his premise—the aliens are transforming Earth before they arrive—ultimately overwhelmed him, and he has been unable to resolve the story after several decades.
| The aliens are almost impossible for humans to perceive, let alone understand, but they’re not invading Earth to steal our water or our women. They’re not evil. |
Other sci-fi writers had this problem, but sometimes in a different way. One of Arthur C. Clarke’s common themes was that space aliens are beyond our comprehension, but also probably wonderfully mysterious. His classic novel Rendezvous With Rama, which may, or may not, get made into a movie, had a mysterious spaceship traveling through our solar system. Humans dock with it and explore its wonders, but are forced to leave before learning who the aliens are, where they are going, or why. They remain a mystery, and the book, which was mesmerizing for page after page, ended without any real resolution. Anybody who read the book and heard about ’Oumuamua immediately thought of Rama.
Clarke had similar themes in 2001: A Space Odyssey as well as Childhood’s End. The aliens are almost impossible for humans to perceive, let alone understand, but they’re not invading Earth to steal our water or our women. They’re not evil. They’re not a menace. But we also don’t know what they really are.
This theme perhaps represents one end of how we perceive our relationship with space and the universe—it is filled with wonderful things we are just starting to wrap our minds around, but may never really understand. This has always been difficult for fictional stories, especially film and television. Steven Spielberg did variations of the friendly aliens in both Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. Probably the only decent recent example of this has been Denis Villeneuve’s brilliant 2016 film Arrival, based on Ted Chiang’s novella. In that film the aliens may look like monsters, but they’re not, and the humans are the real threat.
The alien invasion story represents the other extreme end of our relationship with space and the universe. Alien invasion movies are mostly horror stories, maybe with a bit of allegory about fascism or humans being their own worst enemies thrown in. Space is not a happy place filled with wonder and potential; it’s filled with danger and monsters. Such stories are easier to write than the positive ones, and they’re also more popular. They appeal to the dark part of our psyche. In space, no one can hear you scream, but in the movie theater, everybody can.
These stories, positive and scary, are ultimately allegories for the great unknown, and that may partly explain their persistence. ’Oumuamua is gone, and soon 3I/ATLAS will leave our solar system, and we will never learn their secrets. Maybe we missed out on something wonderful. Hopefully it wasn’t something with teeth.
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