So the movie ‘Arrive’ had to be seen, and was. Job done. Food for thought. And without ‘spoiling’ it, its about aliens arriving from another planet. Not aliens from another country, though the questions raised are roughly the same in both cases.

Do you come in peace? (ET, Close Encounters) Or are you here for dinner? (War of the Worlds).

These massive suppositories arrive, made of ‘unknown material’, tougher than teflon, harder than steel, lighter than feathers, 150 metres high. Usual sci-fi stuff. ‘From another planet’. Inside are the ‘aliens’. They look like Squiddly Diddly. All tentacles and squirting ink, floating/hovering in the mist. Big fuckers. Calamari City. And 12 of these ‘pods’ landed in various places around the world. Oooohhhhhh.

So you have various nations working out the issues. Together. Ish. As is the nature of nations. Trying to communicate with their own visiting squids as best they can. Which is not easy as the visitors only speak in ‘ink circles’ and we use words. Even ‘google translate’ can’t handle that. But fortunately for planet Earth, Amy Adams, linguist exrta-ordinaire, can. Or could. For the purposes of the movie. And Amy has deep love for these deep-sea-looking things, you can tell. She trusts them. They bond. Whereas the Chinese pod-squad don’t. There’s distrust. Which rapidly flows to the Russians and Sudan. Who all want to attack the aliens. Squidicide.

At which point, if there was any doubt, you know you are watching an American movie. ‘They’ are brutal and violent; ‘we’ are calm and prepared to ‘speak’, in an inky way. The squiddleys have almost become less of an issue than the damned Chaaarrrrnese and Russkis.

Yet it remains an interesting point. Aliens arrive; what do you do? The great body of this planet’s science fiction history would suggest a 90% chance that the aliens would want to kill us, eat us or destroy the planet. But that’s only because those films sell better than the ones when we all get on and love each other, like Cocoon.

And how would Donald Trump respond? He’s a real ‘shoot-first-ask-questions-later’ kind of a dude and he calls Mexicans ‘aliens’. What would he do when negotiating with a squid-thing?? Just as important; what would the squid-thing think of humans if Trump was their only example. It’d think we’re all loud, stupid and orange.

Live long and prosper

A xxxx