In Keep Watching the Skies, Bill Warren’s landmark book on 1950s SF movies, Warren made an interesting point. Even when the aliens come in peace, the tone of the films is often that we’re better off if they don’t come here. His specific example was comparing the novel and film of This Island Earth.
The 1952 novel (which I’m about to spoil, so be warned) by Raymond F. Jones opens with radio engineer Cal Meachum discovering a vendor has sent some strange, glasslike beads instead of the condensers Cal ordered (I had to look it up — a condenser is another name for capacitors that store electricity). When Cal tests them, though, it turns out they are phenomenally effective condensers, way beyond anything on the market. But the vendor claims no knowledge of them.
Cal and his sidekick Joe get a catalog that offers even more amazing products, and the equipment for building something called an interocitor. Cal succumbs to temptation, orders the components and eventually puts it together. The interocitor immediately opens up a communications line to a group called the Peace Engineers. They invite Cal to quit his job and work for them; intrigued, he agrees.
When he arrives, he learns the Peace Engineers are scientists and engineers dedicated to seeing their creations and discoveries used peacefully, rather than militarized. One of them tells Cal that if not for them, WW I would have been nuclear; WW II would have left Earth a dead world. Cal, having lived through WW II and now the Korean War, loves the idea. But he can’t help feeling there’s more going on …
There is, of course. It turns out the Peace Engineers are just a front for the Llanna, an alien alliance fighting against the malevolent Guarra (think Allies vs. Axis). Their resources are strained to the point they can’t manufacture interocitors fast enough (it’s a powerful psi-weapon as well as a communicator), so they’ve outsourced it to Earth. One of the aliens compares it to WW II: if you need land cleared and a base built on some Pacific island, you hire the natives. You don’t explain the geopolitics or the ethics of the war, you simply pay them to help you.
This goes pear-shaped when the Guarra decide Earth is valuable enough to their enemies they should annihilate it. The Llanna computer projections show Earth is doomed, but Cal convinces them that’s why they’ve been losing: the Guarra have learned to periodically ignore the projections of their own machines and make random, unpredictable attacks. If the Llana do the same thing, acting against the computers to protect Earth, it’ll blindside the enemy.
Heading home to Earth, Cal feels he’s done the right thing. Even if most of Earth has no knowledge of the Llanna or the war, their destinies have become tied together; the progress of the war will affect Earth’s future. It’s good that an Earthman got to weigh in on it. The subtext is that connecting our island to the vast space civilization is a good thing: “Like it or not, Earth was a member of the community of worlds.”
The movie version is different from the start: Cal (Rex Reason) is a Tony Stark like techtrepreneur, lionized by the press. There’s no Peace Engineers, simply Exeter (Jeff Morrow), the alien front man for what turns out to be the planet of Metaluna. Where the aliens in the novel can pass for human, the Metalunans have huge heads that would seem to scream Not Our Kind (I’ve read that the Coneheads‘ original skits on Saturday Night Live were inspired by everyone ignoring Exeter’s giant cranium).
In the novel, cal meets Ruth, a psychiatrist helping the aliens deal with humans. Here, Ruth (Faith Domergue) is an old girlfriend who pretends they’ve never met. She and Steve (Russell Johnson) warn Cal that all is not well: the engineers working for Exeter are monitored constantly and some who ask too many questions change personalities overnight.
Finally Cal and Ruth make a break for it in Cal’s plane, only to be drawn up into Exeter’s ship. Like the novel, they’ve been working to build weapons for Metaluna; unlike the novel, it’s not good guys/bad guys. The Metalunans are losing the war and so their back up plan is to take over Earth.
Of course it all ends happily for Earth. Metaluna falls before its people can relocate; Exeter redeems himself by taking Cal and Ruth home, even though he’s dying. While the novel is more imaginative and interesting, the movie is good, though odd at the same time. Cal is much more swept along by events than steering them as most protagonist’s do; it works, but it makes it odd enough, I can see why MST3K picked it to mock some years back (they’re still wrong though).
The point here is that as Warren says, the movie takes the opposite view from the book. It’s good that we’re living on an isolated island. Space is scary, full of wars and unfriendly aliens who’ll exploit us for their own purposes. Better we stick to our own world.
This is not an isolated example. In Battleship, one character complains scientists should never be sending messages out into space: don’t they know any civilization advanced enough to respond and visit us will just treat us the way America treated the Native Americans? A stronger civilization will always oppress the weaker. Best we stay here on our own little island.
It’s very far removed from the optimism that made so many of us love Star Trek. And history shows some cultures have traded, negotiated and not immediately tried to destroy each other. So if we ever meet aliens, I’m hoping it’ll turn out Jones was right and the pessimists were wrong. Fingers crossed.
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Based on a recommendation from my friend Ross I checked Brad Ricca’s SUPER BOYS: The Amazing Adventures of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster out of the library to gain more perspective on the Alien Superheroes chapter (which focuses on Superman for obvious reasons). Ricca does a very good job chronicling the guys’ lives and early creative endeavors (Siegel wrote some remarkably funny columns for his high school paper) to the later years when Shuster did kinky illustrations for one magazine and Siegel was working on Archie Comics’ way too camp line of superheroes (curiously, given Ricca mentions Siegel’s fondness for the Shadow, he doesn’t mention his work on Archie’s painfully bad Shadow comic).
Claremont was half-Jewish himself and specifically referenced that and anti-Semitism as an influence. A lot of the time, he comes off as reaching — the idea Doctor Doom as a Roma is lashing out because of his people’s deaths during the Holocaust doesn’t fit the Silver Age take on Doom at all. This was worth a look but not as insightful as it might have been.
Getting to the not-so-successful stuff: IT CONQUERED THE WORLD (1956)has a Venusian monster resembling a giant cucumber with teeth hitch a ride to Earth on one of our satellites. With the help of a resentful scientist (Lee Van Cleef) who’s tired of his ideas not getting the respect he thinks they deserve, it shuts down all power in the area and begins turning key people into obedient, emotionless robots. And they’re only the beginning … Can Peter Graves convince his friend to see things differently? Can wife Beverly Garland (pictured) convince Van Cleef emotions are still good.
We covered it with a blanket to calm her down but it didn’t help. Piteous meowing followed. When that didn’t get her out, Wisp began clawing at the sheet under the cage, pulling it in. I’m not sure what good she thought that would do.
Here are three movies that jazz up stock formulae by adding aliens. Only one of them works though and that would be ALIEN NATION (1988), starring James Caan and Mandy Patinkin as respectively a human cop, Sykes, and the alien “Newcomer” George Francisco he’s partnered with.
Mulder’s stuck with a new partner, Krycek (Nicholas Lea) who’s secretly taking orders from the Cigarette-Smoking Man. Then in the two-parter “Duane Barry/Ascension,” Mulder’s called in to negotiate with a mentally ill FBI agent who believes he’s a victim of alien abduction. Mulder, of course, takes his claims seriously; Scully becomes convinced Barry’s a delusional schizophrenic who’ll say whatever he has to to get what he wants.
Oscar with his sweet, awkward attempts at imitating a human, it’s not that far removed from The Coneheads or the Brother From Another Planet. This is an interplanetary love story with the stranded alien coercing widow Karen Allen into helping him, taking the cloned body of her husband in the assumption this will make it easier for her (it doesn’t, at least at first). While I found the similar kidnapping/romance plotline in 
Wisp and I seem to have lost the rhythm we’d developed now that Snowdrop’s out there. Sometimes rather than come in, she goes off and looks for him or guards against him, I’m not sure which. Last night neither of them showed, which worried me a little. Wisp was back this morning though; hopefully Snowdrop will be here tonight.
As to work, let’s see. I met with the cover designer for Undead Sexist Cliches, who came well recommended. He says he’ll try to get something done and back to me by next week. I also proofed more of it.
For anyone who doesn’t know, the novel concerns a satellite gathering xenobacteria as possible bio-weapons. When it crashes to Earth in a small town of less than 70 people, the men who found it take it to the town doctor, who opens it. By the time the military two-man collection crew arrives, everyone’s dead. The two soldiers die too. Their alarmed CO triggers a Wildfire alert, a special protocol for dealing with extraterrestrial threats of this sort. A crew of four scientists assembles at the cutting-edge Wildfire lab to figure out what caused the deaths, and why two people — a baby and an aging wino — survived. And, of course, how to prevent whatever it is from spreading.
X-FILES FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About Global Conspiracies, Aliens, Lazarus Species and Monsters of the Week by John Kenneth Muir has been a useful guide to watching the series (along with my friend Ross, who’s serving as my X-Files guru for Alien Visitors). Muir covers the various inspirations for the series, the key episodes, what made it stand out from the pack (some of which I covered reviewing 
QUIET PLACE II (2021) isn’t as tense and scary 
Earth and turns out to be a meddling kid (one can only wonder if the writers of Star Trek: Squire of Gothos saw this, though it’s hardly the only example of that idea in SF). In the movie version, we get Jerry Lewis playing Kreton as the kind of annoying man-child Lewis was in many of his films, turning a baffled eye on everything from sex (“Our women are 36 inches all the way down.”) to Beatnik hangouts (though Lewis’ modern dance scene there is pretty funny). Despite making use of Gale Gordon, Fred Clark and Earl Holliman in the cast, this is forgettable stuff. The aliens could almost be angels, sitting around on clouds and demonstrating powers that look more like magic than super-science. “For several years now, certain lunatic elements have proclaimed the existence of flying saucers.”
