Summer blockbuster edition Part Two – when aliens attack!
A grid of the ridiculous vulnerabilities of space aliens in sci-fi movies, novels and TV.
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Next week summer blockbuster season concludes with Part Three -- what science says about the chance of actual space aliens.
The 1898 H.G. Wells blockbuster War of the Worlds introduced sci-fi to the mass audience. (Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein, published anonymously, was known mainly as stage play.)
War of the Worlds has Mars invade England in 1910. Things do not go well for the Royal Navy.
Movie poster for the 1953 film.
But though the Martians possess interstellar spaceships and heat rays, they have a ridiculous vulnerability – they’ve never head of germs. Soon the Martians and their pernicious “red weeds” are dead, with England saved.
The many screen and streaming adaptations of War of the Worlds skip over the political metaphor central to Wells’s book.
The author saw War of the Worlds as a critique of British imperialism. At the time, defenders of imperialism used a might-makes-right argument: because India or Burma had not developed weapons sufficient to repel the Brits, these places deserved to be conquered. Suppose, Wells asked, someone came along with better weapons than ours. Would their might make right?
In movies – especially the 2005 Stephen Spielberg/Tom Cruise treatment – questions such as these are dismissed, to save the run time for explosions.
Whether he intended to or not, Wells created what’s become a leading chestnut of science fiction: seemingly invincible aliens always have a ridiculous vulnerability.
For Summer Blockbuster Part Two – no serious stuff, just fun – let’s look at what was going on in many sci-fi movies, novels and shows.
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