Invasion Alert!: Russians, Scarlett Johansson & Other Blondes Join the Alien Invasion! + Libertas Responds to The LA Times

By Jason Apuzzo. • Finally the alien invasion genre is heading in a direction more to my tastes(!), as Scarlett Johansson has apparently signed on to do an alien invasion thriller called Under the Skin, in which she’s set to play “an alien on earth, disguised as a mesmerizing woman who uses her voracious sexuality to scour remote highways and desolate scenery to snare human prey.” Well! (Right now our male readers are asking themselves, “how come I never run into any women like that?”)

Based on the reporting I’ve seen on this film, it appears that Ms. Johansson’s alien character eventually discovers that Earth men aren’t so bad after all. That’s a relief. Truth be told, I’m not a big fan of Ms. Johansson as an actress, although there are clearly other things worth admiring about her. In general I find her cold and dull on-screen – even if she wasn’t bad in Michael Bay’s underrated The Island – so we’ll see whether she can pull this off. Many people have already been commenting on the similarity of Under the Skin‘s plotline to that of the Species series; the storyline is similar, of course, but the concept of the ‘sexually voracious female from outer space’ has actually been around since the 1950s (1954’s Devil Girl from Mars comes to mind, for example).

We’ll definitely keep an eye on this one – both eyes, actually. No word on whether it will be done in 3D. Here’s hoping it is.

• Our first Invasion Alert! merited a response from the LA Times’ Patrick Goldstein, and we want to thank Patrick for his engagement with our ideas here. In response to Patrick’s thoughtful comments, I wanted to say a few things, briefly: first of all, when I said in my last Invasion Alert! that the new wave of ‘political’ sci-fi films are channeling anxieties about (among other things) the somewhat radical turn in American politics of late, I meant that these anxieties are obviously being felt on both the Left and the Right.

It’s quite evident that filmmakers on the Left like James Cameron, for example, are using their films to address what they perceive to be new strains of corporatist/anti-environmental extremism on the Right, as well as what they consider to be American ‘imperial’ overreach around the world. Those were clearly messages from Avatar.

Or there’s Gareth Edwards’ Monsters, which is obviously a response to what Edwards considers to be right-wing American ‘extremism’ on the immigration issue; or there’s NBC’s The Event, which is using an alien invasion scenario to backhandedly comment on ostensive human rights abuses by the CIA during the Bush years. So sci-fi is being used as an open platform for many different people to comment on many different things right now, and frequently from a liberal perspective. (And undoubtedly many – if not most – sci-fi films coming down the pike will betray no political perspective at all.)

At the same time, it seems highly likely to me that this new alien invasion genre – which actually encompasses about 40 projects right now (either films or TV shows on the books) – will follow thematic patterns similar to the 1950s and 1980s that will pull the material toward a more ‘conservative’/Cold War view of the world. Because let’s face it, none of these proposed alien invasion projects involve friendly alien invasions of America’s Heartland, if you know what I mean.

And although most of these projects will probably be riffing off the War on Terror (Battle: Los Angeles and Dreamworks’ proposed Halo adaptation come to mind here), it’s interesting to note that the plotines for several of the more recently announced alien invasion projects even seem to have a retro-Cold War feel to them – I’m thinking of Sam Raimi’s Earth Defense Force (which actually begins with America fighting the communist Chinese), or Russian filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov’s The Darkest Hour and Apollo 18, or even Michael Bay’s Transformers 3, which apparently features a retro-style, U.S.-vs.-Russia spacerace storyline.

So we’ll see how all this develops. Whatever else, it should be fun to watch. Thanks to Patrick for keeping an eye on us, here.

• We have to talk Tron, of course. The film has a new and final trailer out, which looks spectacular (as always) … and also completely shallow. So that’s now what I’m expecting from this film, along with a light dusting of liberal nonsense about Jeff Bridges’ former company becoming a defense contractor. [Gasp!] In any case, Disney is really going to the mat on this one, releasing one new, boffo poster after another (see here) and even opening Tron stores. They’d better hope the film doesn’t lay an egg. Plus, Olivia Wilde just posed for Vanity Fair. She’s certainly cute; it’s too bad she’s so annoying.

• Visual FX work has already commenced on Ridley Scott’s Alien prequels. Needless to say, those films should be intriguing.

• One of the big announcements of the past week on the Alien Invasion Front was the pickup of Russian filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov’s Apollo 18 project. Bekmambetov is already shooting (in 3D) right now The Darkest Hour, another alien invasion thriller, set in Moscow. Apollo 18 will be riffing off the real-world history of the space race, apparently; here is how the project is described:

With the recent discovery of Russian film footage that suggests that America’s Apollo 18 space mission actually did occur, despite being canceled by President Nixon in the early 1970s, The Weinstein Company (TWC) announced today that it has acquired the rights to a provocative new film project, titled Apollo 18. To be directed by Trevor Cawood from a screenplay by Brian Miller, the documentary-style sci-fi thriller will be produced by Russian filmmaker Timur Behmambetov …

A quintessential Cold War story, Apollo 18 casts light on the covert and undocumented lunar mission that officially “never happened.” Bekmambetov, hired by Russia to shoot a documentary about the Russian space station, recently came across footage in its space archives that bolsters the idea that an Apollo 18 mission did, in fact, take place, and reveals startling evidence of extraterrestrial life forms. This actual footage will be part of Apollo 18, a paranormal thriller that will interpolate fact and fiction.

Interesting. Comparisons were immediately made to another ‘aliens on the moon’ project called Dark Moon recently picked up by Warner Brothers – and so Warners dropped that project yesterday, only to have Dark Castle pick it back up! So the alien invasions will continue. But as a result of the Weinsteins picking up Apollo 18 for a March 2011 release, it now looks like Roland Emmerich has dropped his low-budget/’found footage’ alien invasion thriller that was also set for a March 2011 release, called The Zone. This kind of thing is becoming inevitable, as those Hollywood skies are getting awfully crowded with aliens right now …

• Speaking of skies crowded with alien invaders, it came to my attention recently that both the original Space Invaders video game (at Warner Brothers) and the old Missile Command video game (at Fox) are currently in development as tentpole movie adaptations. Unreal.

• If you have any doubts about whether sci-fi is going political right now, check out this poster for the new Brit sci-fi adaptation of Henry V, starring Michael Caine and Ray Winstone. In case you can’t see it, the poster’s tagline reads: “How will they justify why they went to war?” Hmmm …

• The whole blonde Scarlett Johansson alien thing reminds me, by the way, that the old Roger Corman-Traci Lords alien invasion cult classic Not of This Earth (1988) just go released on DVD this week. This cheeky, fun little flick – featuring Traci Lords fighting off an alien invader while in a nurse’s outfit (when she’s clothed, that is) – is definitely worth checking out, although it’s not as good as Corman’s original. Also just out on DVD this week is Season 1 of ABC’s reboot of V. Season Two of that series debuts in January. On a somewhat lamer note, here are the full, excruciating details on the huge forthcoming Avatar Blu-ray set, as enumerated by James Cameron himself. [Sigh.] The money in my wallet for that Blu-ray might be called ‘unobtanium.’

• Here are some more new set photos of Rosie Huntington-Whiteley in Transformers 3. Hooray!

• Paramount apparently needs to get rolling on its long-in-development adaptation of Dune, or else Frank Herbert’s family will be pulling the rights from that studio. I’ve always thought Dune deserved much better than what it got years ago from David Lynch; with that said, part of the problem here is that George Lucas has been successfully using Star Wars to riff off Dune for years, so there’s some question as to whether it’s worth going back to that well. We’ll see. It’s worth noting here that Paramount recently wanted director Peter Berg to do the Dune adaptation, until he decamped to Universal to direct the $200 million alien invasion thriller, Battleship …

• … and a lot of insider dirt is being dished right now about Universal’s $200 million alien invasion thriller Battleship, starring Rihanna, Brooklyn Decker and Liam Neeson. (Clips of the film just got shown yesterday in Rhode Island for the first time.) Apparently Ron Meyer’s head may be rolling because the film was hastily greenlit at a steep price and with a bizarre, trendy premise (i.e., aliens landing on Earth and getting themselves into a naval battle). Stranger still, it seems that Hasbro has been calling a lot of the shots at Universal lately – no doubt due to the success of their other alien invasion franchise, Transformers.

A novel idea that Universal might want to consider – in part because of the money it would savie them – is developing their own, original ideas in-house. Just a thought.

• All eyes are on the Skyline, so to speak, set to open Friday. The LA Times just did an interesting feature on the film’s low-budget origins (see here), ShockTillYouDrop is running one of its interesting set-visits from the film (see here), and you can catch cast interviews (here) and new clips from the film (see here, here and here), as well. JoBlo’s site is also running a feature on the film’s young new hottie, Crystal Reed.

So will the film be any good? Or will it have an ideological subtext worth mentioning? I have no idea. I’m actually trying to avoid the film’s media onslaught right now, because I’d like to be at least somewhat surprised by what I see in the theater. So far it’s looking like the film will be on the vapid side; or at least, they’re not letting anything loose in the media indicating  that the film is treading on any new ground. The question is whether this film will have negative repercussions for the alien invasion genre generally, if it fails. In the short term I think the answer is ‘yes’; but in the long term? Not a chance.

• If anybody is still interested in Gareth Edwards’ Monsters, Aint It Cool News interviews him here. He’s not done with sci-fi, apparently. Too bad.

• Is this teaser art for the next Star Trek movie? Inquiring minds want to know …

• Harrison Ford talks briefly about Cowboys & Aliens today.

• On the TV front, Steven Spielberg’s big-budget sci-fi series Terra Nova is having cost-overrun problems. [Side note: Harrison Ford says there’s no new update on Spielberg’s Indy 5 yet, as George Lucas and his team are still apparently working on the script.] Also, did you known that NBC’s alien invasion show The Event is more or less turning out as I predicted (see here and here)? A lot of snarky people swamped Libertas months ago and told me how crazy I was when I predicted what direction that show was going in. I notice they’re not coming back to gloat. It’s actually easy to predict this stuff; all you need to know are: 1) liberals, and; 2) how sci-fi works.

• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … the unnervingly hot Brooklyn Decker, star of the forthcoming, $200 million alien invasion thriller Battleship, also has a new trailer out for Just Go With It, in which she stars with Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston. If this movie heads where I think it’s heading, with Sandler dropping Decker for Aniston … I’m going to wretch. Who actually likes Jennifer Aniston these days?

And that’s what’s happening today on the Alien Invasion Front!

Posted on November 10th, 2010 at 11:53am.