THE ALIENS HAVE ARRIVED

As my readers know by now, I think it's worth using a small portion of my tax contribution to fund some science in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).  One of my chapters in SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Humanity dealt with this subject, touching on the time I spent with NASA on SETI.  It's not a huge expense to just measure possible signals, as maybe, all the clues for a definitive Encyclopedia Galactica might well be beaming in.  On the other hand, for the next century or more, forget Man on the Moon Again, or anything about landing on Mars, and, even, let us gracefully abandon the bloated white elephant known as the International Space Station.  Certainly, I don't hold any credence for flying saucers.  So why am I suggesting that aliens from space have arrived?

Well, I have recently seen five films featuring these visitors from outer space.  So what I meant was that these flicks are, or were, in your theaters.  Do I believe in aliens?  Nah.  These outings had escape value.  Of course, there are certain kinds of movies I avoid.  Animated ones, for example.

There was a time when even I could appreciate vampires on the silver screen, but I was quite young, and the vampire was Nosferutu (the first vampire:  Rotten Tomatoes Audience rating of 85%) or Bela Lugosi (Dracula had 77% rating).  Lugosi was there as Count Dracula when Abbott and Costello Met Frankenstein (RT: 81%).  Love At First Bite (RT: 54%) with George Hamilton, was one of my favorites.  It was wonderfully campy, Hamilton had his tongue in his cheek, and at least there was not too much overexposure then.  

Today, we are overwhelmed by vampires on the big screen, but also on TV and in books.  I suspect some actually think there are real vampires around.  What is this fascination with a fictitious myth?  I guess you can also say this about an afterlife and UFO's.  Next, Abraham Lincoln becomes a vampire hunter (RT: 85%). Anything that draws an audience, I guess, but give me a break, please.

So back to those aliens.  Are there now too many of them?  Films, that is.  This past week the top grossers were:

#2  Prometheus
#4  Men in Black 3
#5  The Avengers
#8  Battleship

The fifth film did not even make the top 50, but might well have been the best.  I'll get to it at the end.


Men In Black (RT: 74%) is third in the series, and way over the top, for practically everyone in this version is an alien.  You can count on a #4 with the same cast, including, somehow, Josh Brolin (he's the guy on the left), as he had that special chemistry.  Worse, Ridley Scott's Prometheus (RT: 75%) is #7 in the Aliens sequence, although this one is a prequel, and does not include Alien 2 (RT: 25%...Gigli garned a 15%), an Italian rip-off.  I'll guarantee you there will be an eighth Alien, for the Girl with the Dragoon Tattoo in the Swedish version, Noomi Rapace, escapes in Prometheus at the end with the head of Michael Fassbender, an android named David, what Hal might be from 2001 if he had a body:  

Charize Theron did nothing in the film and died.  I'm not giving much away.  Actually, there could be a ninth, for Sigourney Weaver (right) agreed to do an Alien #5 someday.  If you're confused, that's the whole purpose of this lengthy exposition.  Anyhoo, The Avengers (RT: 96%...wow) is the 6th installment of the Marvel Comic Book sequence, and is clearly the most successful thus far.  However, I liked Independence Day a lot better.

Of these four recent biggies, Battleship (RT: 57%) was my favorite, mostly because all the action takes place in my ocean (right photo just taken from where I am crafting this posting--Pacific Ocean and Pearl Harbor in the background).


The technical details were flawed, but this was almost like watching the Japanese attack on the morning of 7December41 being brought up to the present.  The premise was SETI-related, where signals we send to a distant planet, true to the warning of Stephen Hawking, spur these invaders (imagine an old and shriveled albino Mike Tyson with a white beard) to, indeed, attack.  The star of the show was the battleship Missouri (yes, you can here watch General Douglas MacArthur sign the end of World War II if you click on it) the last one built, now a museum ship in Pearl Harbor.:

There was a fifth alien movie:  Sound of My Voice (RT: 74%).  It came and quickly disappeared.  The reviews were not kind.  It was sort of like Another Earth (RT: 68%).   The lead actress for both was Brit Marling, who also co-wrote the former.   Both were ingenuous, illogical and mostly harmless nonsense, except Sound of My Voice was the only one of all those alien films that presented a case for the existence of an actual alien!  Some reviewers totally missed this twist.  Brit deserves these large posters.

The Avengers  earned half a billion in the U.S. and more than a billion worldwide, while MIB 3 (Can you believe MIB 2 was a decade ago?) has box office revenues of $135 million thus far.  Prometheus made $50 million just in week one of national distribution, and is already approaching $150 million worldwide.  Battleship (boy, is Taylor Kitsch--left and right--the naval hero here, professionally screwed, as he was also John Carter) has passed $50 million, but will not go up much more.  The budget for TA, Battleship and MIB3 was each more than $200 million, and that of Prometheus a little more than half that figure.  John Carter cost more than $250 million to produce, and, as there are Martians in the film, yes, this, too, involves aliens.  SOMV, which, according to Director Zal Batmanglij (below), was written not unlike a calculus proof, obviously had a very low budget and will not reach half a million in box office revenues.  Yet, this is the one I most remember.  It shockingly made sense.

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