The alien Mo-Ron from the show Freakazoid

Last night I watched yet another movie with big dumb aliens in it, Cowboys and Aliens. Don’t get me wrong, C&A was a pretty good movie. I’d give it a 7/10. It’s fun, and it turns out Olivia Wilde is a sexy alien, which I always kind of suspected. But it seems that if an alien isn’t humanoid, they have to be some kind of horrible beast that kills people for some inadequately explored reason. Just listing some recent ones there’s Cowboys and Aliens, Super 8 (7/10 I’ve downgraded it from a previous score), Battle: Los Angeles (6.5/10), and the tv-series Falling Skies (4/10). Not so recently there was Independence day, and who can forget the aquaphobic aliens in Signs. Basically ever since the movie Alien, there’s this trope of big dumb aliens attacking us, that kind of has me peeved.

In Alien it made sense. The Giger alien monster didn’t come to us, we came to it. It was a creature, not an intelligent being, at least not in the first movie or so. But in all the movies I listed, to a greater or lesser extent, all the aliens come from innumerable light years away using technology we can only dream of, and when we see them we are distracted by how coldly they are separating our heads from our torsos using their serrated appendages.

There are other cases where this makes sense. I included Battle: Los Angeles because the aliens are big and burly and are attacking us, but in that movie they were just the soldiers sent to Earth by the weaker, presumably nerdier ruler aliens. In fact for all we know in the movie the soldiers might even be another species conscripted into battle by their previous conquerors.  I still call Big Dumb Alien in B:LA, though,  because there’s something missing in it that’s missing in all of them. Communication. You can’t really develop any advanced level of technology without communicating. You can’t organize the concerted invasion of a planet without it either. And yet we hardly see the aliens communicating at all in Big Dumb Alien movies. Not to themselves, and certainly not to the humans.

Super 8 is a little bit of an exception here. The alien does eventually communicate with a human and vice versa, but, I still include it, because the alien acts like a savage animal throughout most the movie. It can make people understand it if it touches them. Fine, but as my brother asked after he watched it, why doesn’t it just touch everybody then? Why not do that instead of killing people, or tying them up in some cocoon thing?

The aliens in Falling Skies might also be considered an exception because some humans eventually find out they communicate on radio frequencies. And they can also use children as cyranoids, speaking through them against their will. But why not do this all the time from the start? Their goal is to rape the Earth of its resources, fine. But it isn’t exactly working out that well if your operations keep getting attacked by the indigenous population. The idea is that they’re supposed to act like European colonists, but the European colonists had Indian guides. They didn’t start out mindlessly attacking natives. They ate with them, traded with them, gave them small pox that decimated their population, and THEN they killed them.

The other thing I don’t like about Big Dumb Aliens is that they aren’t just dumb, but big too. It just seems to me that any creature that can kill other creatures easily probably has little incentive to develop an advanced civilization. We humans have got opposable thumbs and our brains and that’s pretty much it as far as physical advantages go out in the wild. We have martial arts, but that’s a developed skill requiring technology. We have weapons, but that’s already technology right there. Just us, by ourselves, we ain’t much. That’s why we had to use our heads and work together to survive.

I just have a hard time believing that something with razorblades coming out of its armpits would ever try using a rock to kill something. The whole premise of these naked creatures being intelligent enough to travel through space seems off to me. It’s possible, but it just doesn’t seem likely. The whole reason we wear clothes is because we’re vulnerable. I just tend to think that if we didn’t have to wear clothes, we would have never invented the internet.

One of the best things about Cowboys and Aliens is the alien technology. There’s a nifty alien gadget that melts gold and floats it, dripping, up to receptacles that move it to the core of their ships, presumably giving them power somehow. Their ships aren’t just slightly tweaked versions of our aircraft, they look completely different and yet move how you might expect them to move. There’s a strange feeling I got while watching where I forgot that what I was watching was impossible. The mother ship is buried in the earth (which also seems to be a running theme in these movies now that I think about it) with a large part sticking out of the ground that looks similar to the rock mesas around it in the desert. When the camera first showed it, my eye just sort of took it in with everything else. There’s the plain, the sun, part of a mesa, an alien space craft, another mesa, a horse…wait what? The arm band thingy too, was different, yet it worked so naturally I wouldn’t have been that surprised to find out Steve Jobs or somebody designed it.

But all that care that went into the tech is rather wasted on the big dumb aliens that use it. A human gets a hold of one of their arm guns. Do they organize a group to go after that human and retrieve the weapon? Nope! They just carry on, tra la la, business as usual, kidnapping humans, making them watch television until they forget who they are and then cut them up and kill them for no real reason.

Of course in the movie, the humans are equally stupid. Okay, you know the aliens have these nifty arm guns that are the only things that seem to do them any noticeable harm. You manage to kill a few of the aliens that have the arm guns by luck and guile. What do you do? Keep shooting bullets so you can watch them ricochet off their impenetrable armor… WRONG! Cut their arms off and get their freaking arm guns! What’s wrong with you people!

…But I digress.

Basically the point I’m trying to make here is that if you’re going to write a movie where aliens are going to invade earth, take a few moments to think on things from the aliens’ perspectives. Yes, having a smaller alien body part come out of a larger alien body part is creepy, but how does that help the alien? Is it being creepy on purpose? Is that the alien’s way of saying hello? How about showing that the alien uses the smaller body parts for sophisticated tasks requiring a lot of dexterity or something? Anything. If you can let us know something about where the aliens come from and especially if you can show them working out some form of counter strategy to what the humans dish out instead of them just being evil, that will make the story so much better.

Just a thought.