On 08/23/09 20:38, Darren New wrote:
>> If your house is full of mosquitoes that bite you, and you take
>> pleasure in destroying them, are you a nasty person?
>
> Granted. But I don't think there was any support in the movie for the
> aliens actually being a threat like that. I felt the

	Sure there was. The documentary scenes in the beginning suggested 
terrorist attacks (derailed train was one of them, I think).

	And even if I grant your point, so what? There wasn't any support for 
the aliens actually being harmless either. I'm willing to give humans 
the benefit of the doubt, but not to aliens when I know nothing about 
them (and which the movie didn't tell me much about until quite a bit 
later). The presumption of innocence, IMO, shouldn't be taken as a given 
for nonhuman species.

	Rereading that paragraph, I'm finding trouble getting my point through. 
I'm not suggesting paranoia of the aliens. I'm not stating that it's OK 
to be nasty to aliens that visit the Earth from the get-go. All I'm 
saying is that 20 years have passed, and they've given us *very* little 
information about that time period. For all I know, the humans may well 
be justified in treating the aliens the way they do.

> author/director/whatever was clearly trying to show the humans having
> zero care for what the aliens might want or think. I mean, murdering
> babies is clearly *intended* to show the humans aren't especially nice.

	No, them enjoying it and making fun of it showed that they were not 
nice. The mere fact that they were killing the babies didn't suggest 
that, though.

	Why is killing the alien babies (who were all illegal, BTW) wrong? How 
do I know the aliens weren't merely pests whose babies should be killed? 
I don't until much later.

	As I said earlier, I can't take it for granted that human rights should 
extend to them. It needs to be established.

> I loved the later scenes, with the main guy threatening to take
> "Christopher's" kid away if he doesn't agree to the relocation. That
> just felt so ... bureaucratic.

	Oh yeah - those were the aspects that would have made the movie a great 
one if they had plugged all the holes I'm pointing out. The whole 
interaction between the humans and the aliens was brilliant - but the 
message only hits home once you realized that they shouldn't be treated 
that way.

	Still, I feel if they're going to have aliens that are more or less 
like humans except for their appearance...what's the point? It would 
have been more interesting if the aliens _did_ have fundamental 
differences in behavior, and the story had been more about the lack of 
willingness on the part of the humans to accomodate them.

-- 
How do frogs die? Ker-mit suicide.

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