Films about extraterrestrial life

2159 quotes found

"Like Hong Kong action directors reinventing the western, Australia's current crop of filmmakers are happily absorbing the received wisdom of Hollywood and boomeranging it back at us. Recalibrated film noir. The costume epic as psycho drama. Road movies with no maps. There's no end to the modifications and mutations. Sometimes, of course, the boomerang catches you in the neck. In "Dark City," Down Under director Alex Proyas revisits some of the territory he created for "The Crow," a tale of murder and revenge based on James O'Barr's comic-art novel, which gothicized the city and made the set design as much a character in the film as the late Brandon Lee's unhappy character. With "Dark City," we're in a similar landscape, but this time the set design is paramount. The hero, John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell), awakens in a bathtub and doesn't know where he is. Neither do we. Murdoch seems to be registered at the Hotel Raymond Chandler, the city itself seems to lie somewhere between Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Tim Burton's Gotham City. There's a scene at an automat. Is it the '40s? No, there's a '61 Falcon idling beside a '90s Citroen. Jessica Rabbit look-alike Jennifer Connelly, playing Murdoch's estranged wife, Emma, is a torch singer in a bygone boi^te. Kiefer Sutherland, as Dr. Daniel Schreber, looks like the kid from "A Christmas Story" all grown up and gone bad. He speaks in an asthmatic staccato and walks with a limp borrowed from Everett Sloane in "Lady From Shanghai." William Hurt, as bemused as ever, is Detective Bumstead, a refugee from pulp fiction."

- Dark City (1998 film)

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"Visually, there is a great deal going on. Once you get over the startling resemblance of the threatening, perennially nocturnal city to the setting of “The Crow,” the differences start asserting themselves. Entirely created in the new Fox Film Studios in Sydney, the eponymous metropolis rendered with great imagination by production designers George Liddle and Patrick Tatopolous has the general feel and even the specific street sign style of ’40s New York, with Liz Keogh’s costume designs generally fitting that era as well. But the cars sometimes belong to more modern times, the low ceilings and cramped rooms evoke German Expressionism, and the superhuman powers of the Strangers endow everything with futuristic possibilities. Within the deterministic framework of the piece, performances are solid. The distinctively handsome Sewell is mainly obliged to express the desperate bewilderment and determination of a paranoid victim, and does so better than many others have done with similarly circumscribed roles. As the detective, Hurt fits with great ease into the attitude and look of the picture, while Sutherland has some fun with what can only be called the Peter Lorre role. Connelly fills the bill as the wife with whom the beleaguered hero tries to reconnect, and Richard O’Brien and Ian Richardson are the most prominent of the memorably fashioned Strangers."

- Dark City (1998 film)

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"Dark City, like its predecessor, is a stunningly visual smorgasbord of tenebrous eye-candy, all creeping shadows and urban malaise. Proyas' ability to make a twilight cityscape look menacing is like no one else's. But apart from the sensory input he throws at you, Dark City is a curiously unengaging experience. It's like the CD-ROM games Myst or Riven blown up to huge cinematic proportions while the critical ideas driving the play are left behind. For all its dark splendor, nothing much happens to make you squirm or gasp or weep, as in The Crow. It flatlines before it ever begins. The story seems ripped from one of Kafka's lesser nightmares: Everyman John Murdoch (Sewell) wakes up in a bathtub with blood seeping from his forehead. Suffering from amnesia, he doesn't know who or where he is, or what's going on (in this manner he functions as the viewer's surrogate throughout the film), but he soon runs into the mysterious Dr. Schreber (Sutherland), a paranoid, possibly dangerous physician newly graduated from the Peter Lorre School of Tics and Twitches. Schreber informs him that the city's inhabitants are the victims of some ongoing cosmic experiment being conducted by a race of black-clad, fedora-topped aliens called “The Strangers,” who hope to unlock the secrets of humanity by mixing and matching people's memories. The city, it seems, is entirely a construct of these film noir bad guys, who have the ability to alter reality at will (a power Murdoch himself has picked up as well). Proyas also throws in the only American actress to ever adequately survive a Dario Argento film – Jennifer Connelly – as Murdoch's estranged wife, and William Hurt (suitably vague) as a Forties-style gumshoe out to solve a series of citywide serial killings. Actually, the whole film has a post-WWII feel to it, thanks in part to George Liddle's spectacular production design and Dariusz Wolski's gorgeous cinematography, but the actual time period is anyone's guess. So is much of the plot, though Proyas, who also penned the script, does his best to make things adhere to some internal logic I never quite figured out. Dark City looks like a million bucks (or rather, a million bucks gone to compost), but at its dark heart it's a tedious, bewildering affair, lovely to look at but with all the substance of a dissipating dream."

- Dark City (1998 film)

0 likesAbsurdismDystopian filmsScience fiction filmsNeo-noirFilms about extraterrestrial life
"[opening lines] No one would have believed, in the middle of the 20th century, that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's. Yet, across the gulf of space on the planet Mars, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic regarded our Earth with envious eyes, slowly and surely drawing their plans against us. Mars is more than 140 million miles from the sun, and for centuries it has been in the last stages of exhaustion. At night, temperatures drop far below zero even at its equator. The inhabitants of this dying planet looked across space with instruments and intelligences of which we have scarcely dreamed, searching for another world to which they could migrate. They could not go to Pluto, outermost of all the planets, so cold that its atmosphere lies frozen on its surface. They couldn't go to Neptune or Uranus, twin worlds in eternal night and perpetual cold, both surrounded by an unbreathable atmosphere of methane gas and ammonia vapor. The Martians considered Saturn, an attractive world with its many moons and beautiful rings of cosmic dust, but its temperature is close to 270 degrees below zero, and ice lies 15,000 miles deep on its surface. Their nearest world was giant Jupiter, where there are titanic cliffs of lava and ice with hydrogen flaming at the tops, where the atmospheric pressure is terrible - thousands of pounds to the square inch. They couldn't go there. Nor could they go to Mercury, nearest planet to the sun; it has no air, and the temperature at its equator is that of molten lead. Of all the worlds that the intelligences on Mars could see and study, only our own warm Earth was green with vegetation, bright with water, and possessed a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility. It did not occur to mankind that a swift fate might be hanging over us, or that from the blackness of outer space we were being scrutinized and studied – until the time of our nearest approach to the orbit of Mars during a pleasant summer season."

- The War of the Worlds (1953 film)

0 likesApocalyptic filmsFilms about extraterrestrial lifeScience fiction filmsWar filmsFilms based on novels
"The Martians had calculated their descent upon our Earth with amazing perfection and subtlety. As more of their cylinders came from the mysterious depths of space, their war machines, awesome in their power and complexity, created a wave of fear which swept into all corners of the world. In every country, government officials met in desperate conclave, seeking ways to coordinate their defenses with those of other nations. The government of India, driven from New Delhi, met in a railroad coach, while massive Hindu populations streamed for the imagined safety of the faraway Himalayas. The redoubtable Finnish and Turkish armies, Chinese battalions and Bolivians worked and fought furiously. Every effort against the tremendous power of their other-world antagonists ended in the same frantic rout. As the Martians burned fields and forests, and great cities fell before them, huge populations were driven from their homes. The stream of flight rose swiftly to a torrent. It became a giant stampede without order and without goal. It was the beginning of the rout of civilization, of the massacre of humanity. A great silence fell over half of Europe, as all communication was disrupted. When the last wire photo out of Paris reached the French Cabinet, exiled in Strausberg, they hit upon the idea of using super-speed jets as couriers. Stripped of armament and loaded with extra fuel, these planes maintained connections with the Scandinavian countries, North Africa, the United States and especially with England. It was plain the Martians appreciated the strategic significance of the British Isles. The people of Britain met the invaders magnificently, but it was unavailing. As the Martians swept northward toward London, the British Cabinet stayed in session, coordinating every item of information that could be gathered, passing it on to the United Nations in New York. From there, the news was forwarded to Washington. Because here was the only remaining unassailed strategic point."

- The War of the Worlds (1953 film)

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"Marlene: (narrating) The Lifestream. That's what we call the river of life that circles our Planet, giving life to the world and everything in it. The Shinra Electric power company discovered a way to use the Lifestream as an energy source. Because of Shinra's energy, we were able to live very comfortable lives. But wasn't that because we were taking away from the Planet's life? A lot of people thought so. Shinra used their power to try and stop anybody who got in their way. Shinra had a special group of warriors called SOLDIER. All of the SOLDIERs had Jenova cells put inside them. Jenova was a calamity that fell from the sky a long, long time ago and tried to destroy the planet. Anyway, there was one SOLDIER named Sephiroth, who was better than the rest. But when he found out about the terrible experiments that made him, he began to hate Shinra. And then, over time, he began to hate everything, Shinra and the people against them. Sephiroth, who hated the planet so much, he wanted to make it go away, and the people who tried to stop him. There were a lot of battles. And for every battle, there was more sadness. Someone I love went back to the Lifestream too. And then, it came; the chosen day. In the end, the Planet itself had to make the battles stop for good. The Planet used the Lifestream as a weapon, and when it burst out of the earth, all the fighting, all the greed and sadness, everything, was washed away. "Sadness was the price to see it end". It's been two years since they told me that. But it looks like the Planet is a lot madder than we thought. They call it geostigma. Please. Please don't take Denzel away..."

- Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children

0 likesFinal Fantasy (series)Japanese computer-animated filmsFilms about genetic engineeringFilms about extraterrestrial lifeScience fantasy films
"It is important to note that suddenly, and against all probability, a sperm whale had been called into existence, several miles above the surface of an alien planet. But since this is not a naturally tenable position for a whale, this innocent creature had very little time to come to terms with its identity. This is what it thought as it fell: 'Ahhh! Whoa! What's happening? Who am I? Why am I here? What's my purpose in life? What do I mean by 'who am I'? Okay, okay, calm down, calm down, get a grip now. Ooh, this is an interesting sensation. What is it? It's a sort of a tingling in my... well, I suppose I better start finding names for things. Let's call it a... tail! Yeah! Tail! And hey, what's this roaring sound, whooshing past what I'm suddenly gonna call my head? Wind! Is that a good name? It'll do. Yeah, this is really exciting! I'm dizzy with anticipation! Or is it the wind? There's an awful lot of that now, isn't it? And what's this thing coming toward me very fast? So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like 'Ow', 'Ownge', 'Round', 'Ground'! That's it! Ground! Ha! I wonder if it'll be friends with me? Hello Ground!' [the whale crashes into the ground] Curiously, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell, was: 'Oh no, not again.' Many have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that, we should know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now."

- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (film)

0 likesComedy science fiction filmsBritish filmsFilms about extraterrestrial lifeFilms about authorsSpace adventure films
"There are significant differences, too. For where Alien boasted an on-board computer nicknamed ‘Mother’, a female protagonist and an egg-born nemesis, The Thing is set in an all-male environment, and is as much a study of masculinity in crisis as an update of the sort of siege scenario that Carpenter had already played out in Assault on Precinct 13. The first time we meet chopper pilot and hero RJ MacReady (Carpenter regular Kurt Russell), a loner who lives apart from the rest of the crew’s quarters in a shack outside, he is in the rec room, pouring himself a scotch on ice, and resuming a game of chess – not with one of his companions, but with the computer. “Poor baby, you’re starting to lose it,” he comments, before the Chess Wizard checkmates him. With his masculine ego damaged, MacReady’s response is to pour his drink into the computer’s circuitry, frying it with the words, “Cheating bitch.” It is a misogynistic slur (accompanied by an absurd destructive act) against the only presence on the station that might be deemed female – for the Chess Wizard, despite its masculine name, has the distinctive voice of a woman (in fact Carpenter’s then wife Adrienne Barbeau). With that word ‘bitch’ still ringing in the audience’s ears, Carpenter cuts away to the husky outside, racing from its armed Norwegian pursuers to the relative shelter of the American station – and through the magical implicature of editing, we infer that this new arrival is also a bitch, come to invade this male community with her feminine otherness – even as it smuggles in all the alien cells that will be these men’s ultimate undoing."

- The Thing (1982 film)

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"[narrating] When I was a kid, whenever I'd feel small or lonely, I'd look up at the stars. Wondered if there was life up there. Turns out I was looking in the wrong direction. When alien life entered our world, it was from deep beneath the Pacific Ocean. A fissure between two tectonic plates. A portal between dimensions. The Breach. I was fifteen when the first Kaiju made land in San Francisco. By the time tanks, jets and missiles took it down, six days and 35 miles later, three cities were destroyed. Tens of thousands of lives were lost. We mourned our dead, memorialized the event, and moved on. And then, only six months later, the second attack hit Manila. Then the third one hit Cabo. And then the fourth. And then we learned, that this was not gonna stop. This was just the beginning. We needed a new weapon. The world came together, pooling its resources and throwing aside old rivalries for the sake of the greater good. To fight monsters, we created monsters of our own. The Jaeger program was born. There were setbacks at first - the neural load to interface with the Jaeger proved too much for a single pilot. A two pilot system was implemented, left hemisphere, right hemisphere, pilot-controlled. We started winning, Jaegers stopping Kaijus everywhere. But the Jaegers were only as good as their pilots. So Jaeger pilots turned into rock stars, danger turned into propaganda, Kaijus into toys. We got really good at it... winning. Then... then it all changed."

- Pacific Rim (film)

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"[Opening narration] Ever had one of those nights that starts out like any other, but ends up being the best night of your life? It was June the 22nd, 1990: our final day of school. There was Oliver Chamberlain, Peter Page, Steven Prince, Andy Knightley, and me. They called me the King...because...my name's Gary King! Ollie was funny, he fancied himself as a bit of player, but really, he was all mouth. We called him "O-Man" because he had a birthmark on his forehead that looked like a 6. Haha He loved it! Pete was the baby of the group. He wasn't the kind of kid we'd usually hang out with, but, he was good for a laugh...and he was absolutely minted! Steve was a pretty cool guy. We jammed together, chased the girls... I think he saw us as rivals! Hmph! Sweet, really. And Andy... Andy was my wingman, the one guy I could rely on to back me up. He loved me, and... I'm not being funny, but, I loved him too. There was nothing we were gonna miss about school! Maybe Mr Shepherd, he was definitely one of the good guys. He used to ask me what I wanted to do with my life. I told him “I just wanted to have a good time”. He thought that was funny. It wasn't meant to be funny - not that night! Newton Haven was our hometown, our playground, our universe. And that night, it was the site of a heroic quest. The aim? To conquer the Golden Mile, twelve pubs along a legendary path of alcoholic indulgence. There was The First Post, The Old Familiar, The Famous Cock, The Cross Hands, The Good Companions, The Trusty Servant, The Two-Headed Dog, The Mermaid, The Beehive, The King's Head, The Hole in the Wall, all before reaching our destiny: The World's End! We took my car into town; I call it The Beast, because she was pretty hairy! And so our journey into manhood began. We were off! We didn't waste any time; we hit pub one, and we hit it hard! There was drinking, there was fun, there was controversy, there were ladies, there were shots, there was drama, and of course, there was drinking! By pub five, we were feeling invincible, and decided to purchase some herbal refreshment from a man we call The Reverend Green. Pint six put O-Man out of commission, so we carried on without him. Good thing; I bumped into his sister in the next pub, we went into the disabled's and I bumped into her again! Sam tagged along for a while, but then I had to let her go; I had another date that night and her name was Amber! Nine pints in, and it was us against the world. Things got mental in The Beehive, so we repaired to the bowls club, or as we liked to call it, the 'Smokehouse' - which is when it all went fuck-up! Everyone got Para(noid) and Pete chucked a whitey, so we had to bench him. In the end, we blew off the last three pubs and headed to the hills. I remember sittin' up there, blood on my knuckles, beer down my shirt, sick on my shoes, seeing the orange glow of a new dawn breaking, and knowing in my heart that life would never feel this good again. And you know what? It never did."

- The World's End (film)

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"All right, Lockett. You wanna go there, let's go there. I commanded men and men died. Kids. 19 years old. The best men I ever led. Do you think for a second I wouldn't rather trade places with them? I know you think I got my men killed. They're dead. I'm here. Like the punchline to some bad joke. You think I like that? Do you think a minute goes by that those faces aren't right here, seared into my brain? [points to head]. Dante, Thomas T. Corporal. 1-5-6-5-0-9-3-8-6. Ambruster, William R. Private. 8-7-6-6-6-2-3-5-4. Wharton, Jeffery H. Lance Corporal. 8-7-4-2-7-3-9-9-3. Lockett...Duane G. Corporal. 1-5-6-8-7-0-9... [Lockett: 5-5.] Your brother was an outstanding Marine. He was my friend. And I miss him every day. And you remind me of him. But none of that matters right now. Because our duty is to keep moving forward, to keep fighting. That's how we honour your brother, and Lieutenant Martinez, Corporal Stavrou, Lance Corporal Motolla...Hector's father, who picked up a rifle and did what needed to be done. A civilian did that. So we'd better dang well step it up. Discard any lingering doubt. Work fast, work as a unit and we will prevail. Let's figure out how we're going to get out of this mess. Imlay, you come with me. We need to get to higher ground. The rest of you, find some ammo and some vehicles. There's got to be a few LAVs or armoured Humvees still operational."

- Battle: Los Angeles

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"The problem ... was that the original novella was not structured for film. It has big gaps in time and essentially starts another story two-thirds of the way through. This is when Davidge takes the young Drac back to Dracon and has to deal with their prejudice against him. We just didn't have the money for that. I had to create a new ending where Zammis is kidnapped by gypsy miners who use Dracs for slave labor. Davidge has to rescue him, and this leads to a new understanding between the two races. There was a good line in the film that got cut out, where Davidge's friends come to help him and run into a party of armed Dracs. The Drac who knows about Davidge and Zammis is about to shoot the friends when one holds his hands up and says "Hold it! I don't understand it completely either, but we're on the same side now!" I also wanted to have a scene at the end where Davidge is shown on Dracon at Zammis' acceptance ceremony. To be officially accepted into Dracon society and become head of your family line, you have to stand before the Council of Elders with your father. He introduces you by reciting your line's entire heritage. That's from the book and I wanted to make that a big scene, but it wound up as a matte painting because that's all there was money for. That's as close to the Drac culture as we could afford to come."

- Enemy Mine (film)

0 likes1980s American filmsScience fiction filmsFilms directed by Wolfgang PetersenFilms set on fictional planetsFilms about extraterrestrial life