Earth, third planet from the Sun, Milky Way Galaxy, home. The word home, of having a place that is meant for only a few people, implies there are other homes out there, that we are not alone. Which we aren’t: we’ve proven to ourselves using words and numbers and formulas like the Drake Equation that space is too large and weird and wonderful for just us to exist in it. The real question in the sentence that everyone ignores in favor of alone, is we. Even though we use aliens as a metaphor for our fears of each other, when it comes to aliens humanity imagines we automatically band together, with the United States usually leading the charge. Humanity does not have the power to change whether or not we are alone. What we can change is how
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The “we” in this equation is the whole world, with most of the movie taking place in the United Nations building in New York. The main character Lily Jacobs is a secretary in the United Nations, but this isn’t made explicit until well into the movie. Indeed, the audience doesn’t even know it’s in a science fiction movie for the first act, as it’s setup as a straightforward romantic comedy with only scattered hints of the truth. Lily is harassed by her male coworker Daniel, and feels alone being the only female in her workplace. When the aliens finally do come down, the audience is forced to grapple with its expectations, upset with a serious matter such as aliens being handled by such a “girly” genre, which treats the landing like the mixture of the Apollo 11 mission and the launch party of a flagship fashion line. The aliens land in not a pristine high-tech spaceship but a small, battered black unassuming spaceship. They are a matriarchy who want peace and to learn from each other, and they are the ones that sent out first contact. This leads to diplomatic meetings among representatives of all the countries from the two worlds, like the boring parts of the Star Wars prequels with nary a lightsaber in sight. Still, this desire to not immediately go to war makes them far more formidable than giant spaceships that humanity can destroy with …show more content…
Even straightforward male coming of age stories often treat women like alien creatures, impossible to understand. While my film treatment explicitly answers the question of are we alone, it also challenges humanity to look inward at its social biases- pointing out the We in the question is usually assumed to be white cisgender men. The main character herself, Lily Jacobs, is someone who would typically be five minutes down in the credits, listed simply as UN Secretary. By focusing on her, it raises the question on what other interesting characters we miss while they are running away from the white male action hero trying to solve problems with the alien by blowing everything up. Humanity craves companionship, its greatest fear isolation, but if it treated half of its population as it deserves to be treated, they would discover females are not a mysterious alien race, but people. Often aliens are just metaphors for what we fear at the time- communism, terrorism, the consequences of colonization, such as the aliens in the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers represent communism . Femina represents the fear of many people that women are starting to stand up for themselves even more and break traditional gender norms and roles, demanding to be respected as equals. In The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the movie encourage us to fear the aliens and embrace our paranoia, as the
The “we” in this equation is the whole world, with most of the movie taking place in the United Nations building in New York. The main character Lily Jacobs is a secretary in the United Nations, but this isn’t made explicit until well into the movie. Indeed, the audience doesn’t even know it’s in a science fiction movie for the first act, as it’s setup as a straightforward romantic comedy with only scattered hints of the truth. Lily is harassed by her male coworker Daniel, and feels alone being the only female in her workplace. When the aliens finally do come down, the audience is forced to grapple with its expectations, upset with a serious matter such as aliens being handled by such a “girly” genre, which treats the landing like the mixture of the Apollo 11 mission and the launch party of a flagship fashion line. The aliens land in not a pristine high-tech spaceship but a small, battered black unassuming spaceship. They are a matriarchy who want peace and to learn from each other, and they are the ones that sent out first contact. This leads to diplomatic meetings among representatives of all the countries from the two worlds, like the boring parts of the Star Wars prequels with nary a lightsaber in sight. Still, this desire to not immediately go to war makes them far more formidable than giant spaceships that humanity can destroy with …show more content…
Even straightforward male coming of age stories often treat women like alien creatures, impossible to understand. While my film treatment explicitly answers the question of are we alone, it also challenges humanity to look inward at its social biases- pointing out the We in the question is usually assumed to be white cisgender men. The main character herself, Lily Jacobs, is someone who would typically be five minutes down in the credits, listed simply as UN Secretary. By focusing on her, it raises the question on what other interesting characters we miss while they are running away from the white male action hero trying to solve problems with the alien by blowing everything up. Humanity craves companionship, its greatest fear isolation, but if it treated half of its population as it deserves to be treated, they would discover females are not a mysterious alien race, but people. Often aliens are just metaphors for what we fear at the time- communism, terrorism, the consequences of colonization, such as the aliens in the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers represent communism . Femina represents the fear of many people that women are starting to stand up for themselves even more and break traditional gender norms and roles, demanding to be respected as equals. In The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the movie encourage us to fear the aliens and embrace our paranoia, as the