![]() ![]() The Thing Yes, we're quite aware - and quite fond - of the Howard Hawks/Christian Nyby original from 1951, which was more lengthily called The Thing from Another World and featured a giant vegetable run amuck. But that's the kind of alien Klaatu is – despite his great power, he hangs with the common folk, and takes a particular liking in fact to a fatherless child which might've been nice in 1951 but could get him arrested in 2009. ![]() For if we can blow ourselves up Hiroshima style, why wouldn't we do the same to Alpha Centauri or some other star system? Anti-communist fears are remarked upon in the film, subtly and sometimes not so subtly, as when an old lady who is staying in the same boarding house as an incognito Klaatu comments that the spaceship that recently landed in Washington, D.C. With the dawn of the atomic age, mankind has become a threat not just to itself but to other planets and civilizations. Klaatu (Michael Rennie) comes to Earth to save humanity from itself - and to save outer space from humanity. The Day the Earth Stood Still Robert Wise's 1951 classic features just one alien who lives relatively briefly among us (well, one alien and his pet robot Gort). A TV series was also spun-off from this film - and that was followed by a series of TV movies. ![]() Of course, the aliens here are much more human-looking than in District 9, not to mention more humanely treated, though the alien-as-the-underclass metaphor is clear in both. When a spaceship of former slaves crashes on Earth, these "Newcomers" are assimilated into society and take on human-like names and jobs (even if they were sometimes intended to be funny by the humans assigning them, as with Patinkin's Sam Francisco). Alien Nation Released as a feature film starring James Caan and Mandy Patinkin in 1988, Alien Nation would seem to resemble District 9 on at least a superficial level. Though a sequel was set-up by the film's finale (spoiler alert: alien baby bump), it never happened, though a short-lived TV series picked up that thread rather lamely instead. He assumes the appearance of the late husband of Karen Allen, a certainly shocking development for the young widow who nonetheless soon finds herself helping her new friend and eventually falling in love with him. Starman More love story than hardcore sci-fi, John Carpenter's Starman stars Jeff Bridges in a memorably idiosyncratic performance as a stranded spaceman who must take on human form in order to evade capture by government agents. Newton eventually becomes the captive of the government, which pretty much puts an end to his "living among us" status, but not before he gets the chance to hang with an in-his-prime Rip Torn. who has come to Earth looking for a way to supply his dying homeworld with water, but who gets distracted while here with all the usual human foibles - wealth, power, status, and sex (specifically in the person of Candy Clark). The pop star plays Thomas Jerome Newton, an E.T. Nicolas Roeg's 1976 David Bowie starrer The Man Who Fell to Earth is something of an incomprehensible mess, but it's the kind of mess you can't take your eyes off of. The Man Who Fell to Earth Let's do the oddball thing. Some other aliens return in the present day (led by Brian Dennehy!) to help their brothers out, and then that's when the old people go swimming. Some of those aliens stayed behind even after the rest had left, sleeping in a kind of hibernation until they could return to their home planet millennia later. ![]() It seems that the lost land of Atlantis was real, and it was in fact a colony made up of space people who had settled on Earth. Cocoon Ron Howard's Cocoon goes something like this: A bunch of old people go swimming and get young again… Actually, there's more to it than that. ![]()
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