Alien Universe (14 page)

Red Planet Mars
does not show Martians and is uncharacteristic in that it portrays them as peaceful people. Many other films of the era depicted Martians as invaders or at least potential adversaries. With the exception of communication.
with Mars as a plot device (and the nod to Lowell’s impact), the movie is more about the earthly cares of the 1950s than about Aliens.

Invaders from Mars

Invaders from Mars
(1953) is much more subtle in its depiction of the era’s worries and introduces the ideas of infiltrators: people who look familiar but are clearly enemies. A young boy sees a glowing flying saucer land in his backyard in the middle of the night. His father goes out to see what he’s talking about and doesn’t come back until the morning. When the father returns, he is a changed person. We don’t know it yet, but the Martians have implanted an electrode into his neck that controls his behaviors.

Several additional people are eventually altered. We see this indirectly, as the saucer is now buried under a sand pit and when people walk over the sand, a hole appears and they fall underground and are presumably captured. The boy is unable to convince anyone that something is going on until an attractive female psychologist and her male astrophysicist friend listen to him. It turns out that the astrophysicist is aware of recent flying saucers being spotted on radar. They speculate that the Martians might be invading as a preemptive strike against Earthlings starting to develop rockets, and so they contact the army.

Eventually the army is able to establish that there is a saucer under the ground and they break into it with a commando team. Naturally, the little boy and the psychologist also end up in the saucer and are kidnapped by Aliens, which are large, lumbering humanoids. The humanoids are perhaps not sentient, as they seem to respond to the direction of a different form of Alien, one that can be described as a rather human-like head, set on top of a mass of tentacles. This Alien lives in a big, clear globe and is carried by the lumbering Aliens (
figure 3.5
). This Alien is interesting in that it isn’t strictly humanoid, although it clearly has human-like features. Ironically, these human-like features drive home the point that it is an Alien leader and a huge head indicates its intelligence. Had it looked like a tree, a squid, or a lump of moss, the audience would have had a harder time identifying it as an Alien.

The commando team finds the psychologist and boy and everyone escapes but not before setting demolition charges. The Alien attempts to escape by flying away, only to have its saucer explode in midair.

Invaders from Mars
shows the paranoia of the time of not knowing who among your neighbors might be an enemy. It also showed humanoid and human-derivative Aliens and a classic flying saucer of the sort that had appeared in the press just a couple of years before. The saucer reports in the newspapers had told the screenplay writers what an Alien ship should look like. This movie was remade in 1986.

FIGURE 3.5
.
The dominant Alien from
Invaders from Mars
has a large head, indicative of intelligence and possibly telepathic control over the lumbering worker Aliens. He has a small body and tentacles. Note the strings to make the “hand tentacles” wiggle.
National Pictures Corporation
.

Forbidden Planet

Forbidden Planet
(1956) has been called “Shakespeare’s
Tempest
set in space,” but it could easily have been a pilot show for the 1966 television series
Star Trek
. A spaceship had landed some years before on Altair 4 and communication was lost. Earth sent a military spacecraft, the United Planets Cruiser C57-D, to check it out. This spaceship is a classic UFO, exactly as you’d imagine a flying saucer to look, except it is a ship from Earth (
figure 3.6
).

When they arrive at Altair 4, the military team makes radio contact with the surface, where they are warned away. The planet is dangerous. Ignoring this advice, the saucer lands (no transporters) and the captain, first officer, and doctor are driven by a robot named Robby, who takes them to meet the only surviving passenger of the first spaceship, a brilliant scientist, along with his beautiful daughter, who was born after leaving Earth. He tells them how something killed all the other passengers and blew up the original spacecraft when it was trying to escape.

After some romantic tension between the beautiful daughter and the captain, it is revealed that Altair 4 was once inhabited by a race called the Krell. The Krell’s technology was far superior to anything developed by mankind, although they had been somehow destroyed by their technology in a single night, more than two thousand centuries before. However the scientist had figured out how to work some of their equipment that he had found.

FIGURE 3.6
.
The United Planets Cruiser C57-D from the movie
Forbidden Planet
is a textbook example of a flying saucer. When it lands it sits on three legs that double as staircases.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios
.

Meanwhile, something is killing the crew. Eventually, a large flame-like creature tries to get through the C57-D’s force fields. The captain decides to evacuate the planet and returns to collect the scientist and his daughter. The scientist’s compound is attacked, and it is eventually revealed that the monster is the unconscious mind of the scientist, amplified and personified by the immense power of the Krell. The scientist is overcome by remorse for what he did to the passengers on the original spaceship, so he sets a self-destruct sequence that the Krell had put into place and then dies. The captain is able to escape with the daughter and Robby and the C57-D makes it just far enough away to avoid being destroyed by the detonation that shatters the planet.

Fans of
Star Trek
will recognize
Forbidden Planet
as a story that follows a typical
Star Trek
plotline. Gene Roddenberry, creator of
Star Trek
, admitted in his official biography that
Forbidden Planet
was one of the inspirations for his popular television series. For our purposes, we never encounter the Krell, except that we know that they were an ultra-powerful race, undone by their own technology and hubris. And the C57-D is an iconic example of a flying saucer, cementing in the audience’s mind the image that originated in a headline writer’s creative interpretation of Kenneth Arnold’s first UFO report.

Earth vs. the Flying Saucers

Earth vs. the Flying Saucers
(1956) is another example of the presence of flying saucers in the public mind. As the title suggests, this movie was a classic shoot ’em up between Earth and Aliens. The movie starts with a newlywed couple driving on a deserted highway, when they were buzzed by a flying saucer. This is somewhat reminiscent of Betty and Barney Hill, although the movie preceded their experiences by five years, and no amnesia was involved. The husband is the lead scientist of a government program called Project Skyhook, which involves launching artificial satellites into space, and he is driving while dictating his notes into a tape recorder. As the saucer buzzes the car, it emits a high-pitched insect-like sound, which is recorded on the tape.

The two continue to the base from which the satellites had been launched. After being informed that the previous ten satellites had been shot down, the scientists launch the eleventh satellite, which also gets lost. Shortly after the launch of this last satellite, a flying saucer lands at the base, and three humanoid Aliens come out. One of them is shot by a soldier, and the Aliens retaliate with ray guns that kill. The flying saucer then devastates the base hosting Project Skyhook. The husband and wife become trapped underground, and, as the air grows stale, he records what he thinks will be his last words. As the batteries die, he plays the sound the saucer makes, only to find out that it was a sped-up verbal notification that the Aliens would be landing at Project Skyhook.

The husband and wife are rescued and go to Washington, D.C., where they tell their story. The Aliens radio the scientist how to contact them and, against orders from U.S. officials, he goes off to meet them. His wife notifies an army major who had been detailed to watch them, and the two follow the scientist driving at high speed. The scientist is joined by his wife and the major, and the three enter the saucer. The Aliens reveal that they intend to take over the world and show that they can read peoples’ minds and learn everything the person knows.

The scientist is given 56 days to bring together the leaders of the world to Washington, D.C., to surrender to the Aliens. Then the scientist, his wife, and the major are released. The scientist builds two weapons, first a sonic ray of minimal destructive power and then an electric beam that disrupts the flying saucer’s magnetic propulsion system. Many versions of this electric beam are built and installed in army trucks.

On the appointed day, the flying saucers approach the U.S. capital and start blowing stuff up (
figure 3.7
). The earthlings fight back and eventually shoot down the saucers. It seems that the battle scenes of the much later movie
Independence Day
might owe a creative debt to
Earth vs. the Flying Saucers
in how the Aliens damage Washington, D.C.

FIGURE 3.7
.
In the movie
Earth vs. the Flying Saucers
, a fleet of classic flying saucers wreak havoc on Washington, D.C. Here they fly over the Lincoln Memorial.
Clover Productions
.

Earth vs. the Flying Saucers
is not an overtly political movie, but it is a classic conflict between good guys and bad guys. The flying saucers are quite stereotypical in design and demonstrate yet again how deeply the saucer image had permeated the culture. Aliens and flying saucers were now solidly mainstream.

Wrap Up

The glut of 1950s UFO movies began to taper off before the end of the decade, shortly after the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957. The desire for imaginative depictions of flying saucers was over, replaced with the very real earthly space race. Mankind realized that we could conquer space ourselves, and the idea of talking about Aliens in space somehow seemed passé. In the next chapter, we will discuss the period from 1960 to the present. Even though this spans more than half a century, the character of science fiction had changed. The era of the high-impact blockbuster had come. From the period of the 1970s onward, science fiction was a mainstream staple in the television and movie industry. Aliens were everywhere, although not always intended to be taken
seriously. The filmmaking and moviegoing culture had changed to consciously treating Aliens as a way to express our own, earthly, concerns. Essentially, Aliens were no longer alien. Instead, the past few decades have resulted in a handful of high impact movie and television franchises that have extensively infiltrated the psyche of humanity. In the next chapter, we will talk about them.