“If the aliens are anything like us,” tweets someone in the drama insightfully, “they are certainly not coming in peace.” Stacey imagines that US gun sales double and paranoid memes from bleating Earthlings clog social media. An anthropologist confirms that this is what would happen – after all, Covid led to shortages of pasta and toilet paper, so a suspected alien attack would surely make humanity go even more wild. Then astronomers witness a mysterious object, like a huge space ship, or Battlestar Galactica’s wing mirror after a space prang, falling in a weird trajectory across the sun.įaced with this apparent evidence of alien life, humanity, in Stacey’s drama, panics. He imagines that Nasa’s new James Webb space telescope produces evidence that a radio communication just like the “wow signal” in 1977 originated from an exoplanet of a binary star system a few hundred light years from Earth. Could it be a spacecraft? The favoured explanation now is that it was a hunk of exoplanet, but let’s not spoil the story.įrom these ingredients, Stacey makes a cosmic soup of a programme. Named ‘ Oumuamua, it was up to 1,000 metres long, and was found to be accelerating due to non-gravitational forces. In 2009, the space telescope Kepler was launched to find Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, so-called Goldilocks planets where life as we know it is possible.įinally, in 2017, an object was spotted flying past the Sun. In 1977, the superbly named Big Ear radio telescope picked up the so-called “wow signal”, which appeared to come from extraterrestrial life in the constellation Sagittarius. We can hardly communicate with other Earth-based life forms, he adds, so what chances have we got with beings from outer space? Cephalopods think with their limbs, he argues, which is just one reason wrestling an octopus is a mug’s game and beating a squid at underwater chess is beyond even the skill set of Anya Taylor-Joy.įirst Contact draws on three real-life incidents for its dramatic material. Fair enough, but way to destroy the programme’s premise, Poindexter. Instead, we get a very sensible ex-Nasa scientist who doubts that humans have the right stuff to communicate with aliens. I wanted different talking heads, The Simpsons’ perma-drooling one-eyed extraterrestrials Kang and Kodos ideally, telling us Rishi Sunak has been vaporised and they are our new overlords. Talking heads, all disappointingly humanoid, witter about gravitation and radio frequencies. David Shukman, a former BBC science correspondent, gamely produces fictional reports on what, if anything, it all means. In thinly dramatised sequences, news anchors wax excitable and small boys interviewed in the street get very animated about the possibility that little green gender-indeterminate entities are coming.Īn unacceptably high proportion of this feature-length show consists not of dramatised scenes but of white noise and sub-Koyaanisqatsi imagery. Although it is billed as a dramatisation about what it would be like for us to encounter extraterrestrials, all we get is fuzzy mocked-up footage of space debris and a radio signal that probably isn’t Test Match Special but a cryptic message sent from a planet several hundred light years away. Nic Stacey’s film First Contact: An Alien Encounter (BBC Two) honours this sci-fi sub-genre by being quite dull. The disappointing truth about aliens is that hardly any of them, perhaps none, are as cute as ET. There isn’t a black hole big enough to consume all the tedium produced by Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner in Arrival. Apart from Richard Dreyfuss moulding mashed potato, Close Encounters of the Third Kind is really dull. Boring has long been part of the territory when it comes to imagining our first contact with aliens.
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