Like water for aliens

Hollywood sends mixed messages about a lot of things: racial discrimination, socioeconomic stratification, sexual liberation and, of course, violence. How do we know that our children are getting the right sort of education at the movies? When we can no longer be sure whether today’s youth will be liberalized by Al Gore, communized by Michael Moore or sexually actualized by Demi Moore, there seems to be cause for concern.

But perhaps the most glaring ambiguity currently being fed to us by greedy producers with little regard for the future of humanity is potentially the most detrimental, and it has only been exacerbated by the most recent of alien war films that star Michelle Rodriguez, “Battle: Los Angeles.” Hollywood has given us every extraterrestrial imaginable, from Body Snatcher to Dream Catcher, and we’re all still left with the question: What exactly do we do with our planet’s water in an alien invasion?

Think back to 2002. It was a simpler time, when aliens communicated by crop circle and click language, and one was always warned of their coming by dissonant violins and a sudden orchestral hit. I’m speaking, of course, of “Signs,” whose aliens could be beaten back with a baseball bat and handily corroded with the most ample and unadorned of earth’s resources: water. However horrifying the alien and however poisonous his toxins, we could rest assured that the day could be won with a little H2O and a lot of Mel Gibson.

Flash forward to 2008, and we’ve all become quite content with the idea that we can flee to a river or lakeside in the event of an encounter of the third kind. Well, try telling that to all the people who lost their lives fleeing that party in “Cloverfield.” J.J. Abrams single-handedly upended the notion of hydrophobic alien monsters when a Godzilla-like amphibian roared out of the Hudson to destroy the better part of Manhattan.

So where do we turn? Who do we trust? Do we take the word of the man who made a mermaid out of a motel pool, or do we hold with the creator of prime-time television’s first desert island time machine? This past year’s films might hold the key.

October of 2010 brought us “Skyline,” where the aliens, per usual, tried to suck out our brains and turn us into subservient automatons. It was a fairly textbook alien invasion, made complete by trance-inducing blue lights, but there’s more: The aliens didn’t seem to like water, and even the film’s less-than-intelligent 30-somethings were able to figure out that there were no alien ships above the ocean.

Here again we see a dramatic peripeteia in the conventional wisdom of alien invasion survival. NASA is of no help, as they constantly claim that alien life couldn’t possibly exist without water, and yet the movies show us time and again how water can reduce even the most menacing of invaders to poetic displays of weakness.

With neither scientist nor scientologist able to give a definitive argument for how alien attackers will respond to our planet’s lifeblood, last week’s “Battle: Los Angeles” appeared to be the last, best hope for a strategy.

Within 15 minutes of the film’s opening, the aliens crash into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California and begin marching up the beaches, guns blazing. Great! They’ll attack from the water, so avoid the water. Time to close the book on that one. Wait a minute... not only are they attacking from the water, they’re here to take our water! Apparently earth’s H2O has the “unique quality of being liquid,” according to some mustachioed Stanford professor the film relies on for exposition, and the aliens are here to harvest it not, as one might expect, to drink, but to fuel their spaceships. Lolwut?

Far from providing insight, this film completely annihilates any hope for a definitive exit strategy. While it may not be true, as Roger Ebert writes, that those who like this movie are “idiots,” it certainly is true that the movie perpetuates a dangerously obfuscated characteristic about aliens. Do they get killed by water? Do they come out of it? Are they coming here to get it? Hollywood has done little in the way of preparing us for the inevitable war of the worlds, but maybe it’s just that fear of the unknown that keeps us coming back to the box office.

Derek Speranza is a Trinity junior. His column runs every other Tuesday.

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