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sya ([personal profile] sya) wrote2025-06-14 05:42 pm
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Alien Invasion Movies & Hindsight

(Reposted from tumblr)

I watched a couple of alien invasion movies, growing up. It was never a huge interest of mine, but I'd watch and enjoy them when the chance came up. I was scared of aliens and all of the technology that they used, with a few exceptions which I will talk about later.
 When I first realized I was an alien species, I asked myself, "if I really am a nonhuman alien, why would these movies scare me so much?" Under the cut, I'll talk about some of my early childhood experiences with alien movies.

Ironically, my dad likes to mention how Men in Black was the first movie I saw in theaters back in the 90s, even though I was too young to remember it. I also cried when the cockroach alien guy came up on screen, I couldn't blame toddler me for that, even though he makes me laugh in my older age whenever I see him. But nowadays whenever I watch it, I can't help but laugh because a big part of the story was about aliens disguised as human in a city, trying to live their lives, where no one would suspect a thing. They made a joke about this too, and it really called me out.

Onto the more serious and scarier movies, I felt that alien invasions were a legitimate threat when I was a little kid, I know now that's not the case though. It comes down to a few things. 1. Invasions are scary, no matter whoever does it. 2. I did have to fight through alien invasions before, on multiple worlds, some were against factions that wanted to destroy life off of planets. And 3. There was actually one alien movie that didn't scare me so much when I was younger, War of the Worlds.

The tripods don't scare me. Even back then, I thought they were really cool looking and badass. It felt weird to see an alien movie and not being scared of their alien technology when I was much younger. There was a strange absence of fear, where I would normally be terrified to see them walking around. I've rewatched it now, and the human harvesting they did inside the machines really does creep me out. But that fear is still fully removed and separate whenever I see the tripods just walking around and destroying cities and vaporizing people with their laser beams. And, well, here's one from the movie and one from the source. They both shoot laser beams, by the way:

It was at least a solid decade before I even saw a colossus when I looked into the game's lore. Back in 2005 to 2006, they just didn't exist in game at all. But they were released in the second game during 2010. My first thought was just, "hey, they look like those tripods. Neat."

Around the same time, I became a fan of the alien v.s predator movies. My aunt and uncle had life sized Halloween costumes of them. And I always rooted for the yautja. In my mind, the yautja were just some guys from another planet who wanted to fight and kill things. And they have an honor system, where they only went after targets that could potentially defend themselves. I was able to respect that, even when they took a villainous role. It was nice to see aliens not inside vehicles and see them as actual, living organisms.

I must have been around 7 or 8 years old, but my uncle was dressed in a life sized yautja costume, and I thought it was the real thing. Yes, I was a little scared at first, but you got to understand, that I was also afraid of Santa a few years before that, (lol). And the fear of seeing the yautja wasn't actually that bad. I wasn't hiding behind a couch the whole time. Sadly, it's been so long that I don't remember how the conversation with the "yautja" went. I don't remember what sort of questions I asked, but it was still a fun experience. My species are pretty similar to them culturally, and with the high tech weaponry they had. I could respect something coming out of a ship to fight something dangerous face to face. I have a very similar mentality.

Lastly, there's this scene from Independence Day that really scared me. As I've written on in my wild, miscellaneous noemata entry:
"I was watching the movie when I was about 12. It was scary, but I didn't lose sleep over it at the time. But at some point in the near future, I managed to give myself a small anxiety attack over a certain clip from the movie. I don't remember what triggered this sense of dread but I remember getting some sort of existential dread in the middle of class. It was the scene between the scientist and the escaped alien, (called the harvesters) that they were originally trying to dissect. They thought it was dead but it woke up. Then, the alien began to use the scientist's own body like a puppet and demanded that the other humans need to release it, that there will be no peace, and it wanted to kill everyone. The other kicker is that these aliens resembled some of the Big Antagonist's hybrids almost exactly."

Now, I think it was a mixture of the possession, the feeling of being faced with an uncompromising enemy that wants to commit omnicide, and the appearance of the alien that scared me back then. Some of the words that the Big Antagonist and its hybrids used were very reminiscent of the dialogue that was between the harvester alien and the humans with whom it was talking to in the movie. I couldn't replay this campaign without thinking of this clip. The kicker is that this anxiety attack happened around the year 2008. But there is a very clear resemblance, leading me to think that the harvesters were used as inspiration for one of the hybrid forms.

Essentially, the things that the creators probably used for inspiration while developing the game were already an influence on me for no apparent reason before it was made 'canon.' It still 'validates' me even if they took that influence from other media. Because I already had these experiences before I knew anything about the source. A lot of the concept art and designs that ended up becoming canon just so happened to be accurate in some strange trick of the universe. And I can't really explain these coincidences.