Suicidal aliens



The vent
So.. I watched the new 'Independence Day' movie. First off - what an amazing combo of  terrible film making and thrilling sfx. I can't believe someone gets paid gazillions to write such shitty scripts. The disaster is really not in the movie but in the making of the movie - the end of intellect and start of idiotopia.
I think they should have edited out all the dialogs. It would then have been a better movie. A 'disaster movie' porn of sorts. With just the sfx to get thrilled with and no jarring and stupid dialogs and no non-sense attempts at building emotional arcs and no lame character building.

Anyways, here's some more venting about current lack of imagination - 

Tired trope 1: The kill switch - Aliens with a death wish
Independence day, Star wars, 10 Cloverfield Lane...
So to defeat a highly advanced aggressor civilisation that has apparently destroyed many civilisations before us, all you need to do is find and kill 'ONE' queen bee/ shoot down 'ONE' spaceship. Yes that makes sense. The alien species that is atleast a thousand years ahead of us in terms of technological and social evolution is smart enough to have a kill switch for its opponent to use. And to have it apparently accessible. That makes sense.
Centralisation is a primitive mode of organisation. I bet no decently advanced civilisation will be as centralised as the modern globalised era on today's Earth. All eggs in one basket?

Tired trope 2: The outlaw hero 
All Hollywood movies.
So all you need to save the world is one man. Never a woman. Just one man. Any more than that, or any organisation gets involved and the Earth will be destroyed for sure. It must be a solitary exercise. The role of others, is only to supplement this one man's acts, to listen to him unquestioningly, to cover his ass when he messes. They are worthless and they know it.
He need not be intelligent, trustworthy or well - balanced. He must be a cowboy who shoots from his hip. He takes impossible odds. He doesn't listen to others. He does what he feels like. And somehow always manages to hit the quite apparent killswitch that the aggressor civilisation has been waiting for him to push for them - the aliens with a death wish. 

The End of the World
Cloverfield, Independence day, Transformers and so on.
Hollywood makes you think it's inevitable. Ofcourse, the alien is a metaphor. But I forget what the metaphor stands for. So the aliens are after Earth's resources. They want to kill us because they want to access Earth's resources. So the aliens are really our greed externalised and projected? And the utopian belief is that we will one day win over our greed?
Or is it a fantasy to 'start over'?

An antithesis to 'No country for old men'
'No country for old men' brought alive the concern that we feel - world changing in ways that are out of our comprehension. We are losing control over our reality, our relations, our communities, our towns... and then a new generation rolls in that is essentially nomadic - chasing money in big cities. everything is liquid - money - to them. They are running the show now. And the show is violent to its core - uprooting things, paving paradise. living high speed towards self-destruction.

So what would be the utopia for these people who feel out of control and have lost their worlds?
They want to start over. They want the 'world to end'.

Start over to do what?
And here's the idea for better movies. Right now movies and even modern literature seems to be clueless about the utopia they want to build and to share with others. Why are we so unsure about our utopia in the age of 'big data'?
Well, for ideas one can start by reading Ursula Le Guin or even Ian Banks' 'Culture' series. (Well, these come to mind because I am reading these now. I am sure there are more futurists out there.)

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