Out of this world

CONSTANTINOS PSILLIDES recommends five watches about aliens to stream

When Chris Carter first conceived the tagline for the legendary X-Files, he could not have guessed what an impact it would make. ‘The truth is out there’ has since been the rallying cry of UFO enthusiasts and UFOlogists. And lovers of little grey/green men have been backed up recently with the Pentagon admitting that there are numerous reports of sightings of things that cannot be explained and an alien mummy being presented at the parliament of Mexico. With Netflix releasing a docu-series dedicated to what is out there, what other things can you watch if you are in love with an alien, if you are in love with her eyes? If you got that reference, don’t forget to take your back medication.

Encounters

Encounters is a four-part docu-series, with each episode dedicated to a specific alien sighting/abduction incident. The first, Messengers, deals with a UFO supposedly seen by over 300 people in Texas and a life-long quest to find out what truly happened. The second one, Believers, concerns another well-known incident in Rwanda where over 60 schoolchildren claimed to have seen a flying saucer and aliens coming out of it. Who weren’t there just for fun but telepathically told the children that the environment is in danger. I mean they could have been more effective visiting a G20 summit but hey. The third, Broad Haven Triangle, again recants the stories of children while the last one, Lights over Fukushima, deals with the connection between nuclear energy and aliens and whether they decided to reside in the oceans.

Here’s the thing with this series: it is not exploitative, as these docs tend to be. The shows present their subjects in a very flattering light, giving them a chance to tell their story in a high-budget, well-shot docu-series. In their attempt to give their subjects room, the creators let their claims go with minimal fact-checking and letting outlandish claims go unchallenged. No joke, at some point someone flat out says they are an alien. You would think there would be follow-up questions but no.

If you weren’t already convinced of what lies beyond, these shows won’t convince you. If you were already in, you will love every minute of them.

MIB

Aliens are not out there, they are among us. And who will protect us? The Men In Black of course! Revisit this 1997 classic masterpiece, the movie that made Will Smith into a super-star and gave us a banger of a soundtrack. Smith plays a New York Police officer recruited into a secretive task force code-named MIB. Smith is scouted by Agent K (the ever-grumpy Tommy Lee Jones) and is later tasked with showing a new recruit the ropes. Enter an inter-galactic threat and we have ourselves a movie!

Warriors of the Future

Human exoskeleton battle armour, killer plants from outer space, giant robots. We have talked about Korean cinema before and how it is giving Hollywood a run for its money, mainly because they know how to shoot an action scene. And this movie is full of them. Not so much on the logic and thinking part but hey, I refer you to the first sentence. The plot? Earth managed to almost destroy itself by building giant battle robots (admittedly, a great way to go out) and an alien plant species has invaded the land, killing people but cleaning the environment. Now the remnants of Earth soldiers need to find a way to harness that power, while at the same time smashing the rogue robots. Korean cinema might not know how to do subtle, but it knows how to do awesome!

Annihilation

Led by Natalie Portman, Annihilation can best be described as surrealist sci-fi. A meteor crashes in Florida and creates a zone known as the Shimmer that is gradually expanding, changing the morphology of everything it touches. Following failed attempts to discover the nature of the shimmer, the US sends a team of scientists to discover what is happening within the zone and how it can be stopped.

Life

We can’t have movies about aliens without the standard ‘trapped in a confined space with a menacing alien on the loose. Life is a 2017 film starring Rebecca Ferguson, Jake Gyllenhaal and Ryan Reynolds, playing three astronauts returning from a historic Mars mission, as they have collected a sample of what they consider to be proof of extra-terrestrial life. And everything went well, humanity prospered and no entity was released in a space station to wreak havoc.