Movies for Martians: the five best movies to show an alien
Let’s be honest, the first thing you’d do if you saw a glittering spacecraft land in your garden with an audible wobble is scream. You might even fall to the floor in fear, lock all your doors, close all your curtains, call the police and then hide under your duvet. But, there’s a chance (albeit a very small one) that when the bulbous alien inevitably comes knocking on your door, all they’ll want to do is watch a movie.
So, desperately trying to still be a courteous host despite your guest dripping with ectoplasm and speaking in a language that sounds a bit like Simlish, you venture into the kitchen to fetch them a drink and a movie snack. Your hands are trembling too much to pour out a soda pop, so you just hand them a carton of milk and a pipe of Pringles as your guest absorbs the refreshments into their skin before stretching out what might be a disturbed grin.
Now for the tricky part. Nothing seems more awkward than scrolling Netflix with a pongy extraterrestrial beside you, so you blow the cobwebs off your DVD collection and pick from those. Before they see what you’re doing, you snap the DVDs of Fire in the Sky and War of the Worlds in two (you don’t want them getting any pesky ideas) and present the creature with five options.
Your picks are calculated, choosing either something that will terrify them enough that they’ll fuck off back to Xcloknagorg, or a film that might actually inspire the creature and its mates to one day return with a bizarre idea of what human life is really like. You ignore their request for another pipe of Pringles as you press ‘play’.
The five best movies to show aliens:
Babe (Chris Noonan, 1995)
As the pair of you watch Chris Noonan’s charming 1995 movie Babe, which tells the story of a piglet who narrowly avoids becoming food to find an unlikely job as a sheep herder, you confuse the alien by trying to convince it that animals can, indeed, talk. For the uninitiated, this isn’t even such a wild concept to accept either, so by showing the creature Babe, you’d be playing a practical joke on an entire civilisation when the alien eventually heads back to its home planet to tell them of Earth.
What’s more, you’d actually be showing the alien a classic piece of festive 1990s filmmaking featuring fantastic voice performances from the likes of Christine Cavanaugh and Danny Mann. The alien may even shed a tear or a weird cosmic equivalent.
Dude, Where’s My Car? (Danny Leiner, 2000)
Depending on how nice this extra-terrestrial was being, you could take the risk and smoke a joint with it while watching Danny Leiner’s stoner comedy Dude, Where’s My Car?. While the notoriously silly 1990s movie, telling the story of two dim-witted friends desperately trying to find their lost Renault Le Car, starts off with fairly standard humour, by the end, you might just give the alien an existential crisis.
Indeed, at the finale of Leiner’s comedy, starring Ashton Kutcher and Seann William Scott, the duo faces off against a bunch of aliens, each battling for control of the ‘continuum transfunctioner’. If you’re lucky, the alien might even let out a cute little giggle.
Mac and Me (Stewart Raffill, 1988)
From one alien movie to the next, why not try to treat your new extra-terrestrial pal to a bit of culture with a screening of Stewart Raffill’s 1988 movie Mac and Me? In the endless cosmos, Raffill’s film, which was bizarrely financed by McDonalds, might even be a documentary, with the weird alien protagonist, who looks like a chicken nugget which was left at the back of the fridge for one too many years, being a real-life creature.
Best known for the fact that Paul Rudd endlessly takes the piss out of it, Mac and Me, which essentially ripped off Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, would be a really confusing pill for your new alien friend to swallow.
Samsara (Ron Fricke, 2011)
Of all the films on this list, Ron Fricke’s documentary Samsara would be the best one if you wanted to genuinely educate the aliens on the customs of planet Earth. Transporting the viewer on a fabulous trip across the world, taking into account different religions and natural wonders of the planet, watching Samsara with an alien is the closest thing you’ll get to giving them a whistle-stop tour of the world.
But you might want to consider fast-forwarding the scene where a man covers himself in clay and freaks out in order to avoid the alien getting too scared and vomiting decades-worth of space gunk all over your LCD screen and nearby family photos in the splash zone.
Trash Humpers (Harmony Korine, 2009)
The chaotic, evil cinephiles among us may choose to show their unwitting alien guest the bizarre 2009 black comedy Trash Humpers by Harmony Korine. As the title suggests, Korine’s oddity tells the story of sociopathic elders in Nashville who cause havoc and shag trash. No doubt, if you showed the alien Trash Humpers, they’d be side-eyeing you the entire runtime before slapping their knees the moment the credits began rolling, garbling “right!” and dashing for the back door.
Then, as you saw it swiftly waddle in panic across the garden and back to their vehicle, you could watch on and laugh at the knowledge they were never returning unless, of course, it was to fetch the DVD sequel Babe: Pig in the City.
