“I like Zahler’s stuff, and especially his ideas. I don’t know that I love his drawings, and some of his dialogue reads like, well, the kind of dialogue you get in comics when you bring a prose writer into the game.
That said, this sort of reads like a pretty good Star Trek episode, and looking at it that way makes it seem, I don’t know, it’s easy to overlook the flaws and see it for what it is: a pretty decent story with some interesting quirks.
And I like the idea of someone doing shit like this themselves, absolutely NO need to bend or change anything for anyone else. It’s gotta be a relief from working in movies, which seems like the opposite situation.
It’s imperfect, and I think the imperfection gives this one the feel of a truly independent project with something to say and something to ponder.
All that said, I am generally on the “let’s blow up the aliens” side of things.
SPACE aliens, okay? Little green men. Not like dudes who live in Mexico. I’m not a fan of blowing up those guys (though I would perhaps have a grudging respect for anyone who posed it, at least they’re being honest instead of trying to hide what they’d really like to do behind a giant stupid wall or whatever, and then we could just all be like, “Alright, well, that’s crazy, moving on.”)
These “blow up the aliens” guys are in every movie. Usually it’s a military guy, or a couple military guys, who are also assholes and jerks at the same time. They’re ALWAYS wrong in the movies, but sometimes I think we should see it from their perspective.
WE are watching a movie about aliens, and we don’t really know what the aliens are doing there. So we, of course, know that treating the aliens as hostile is potentially a mistake, depending on the kind of movie. Is it a movie with explosions where a dog jumps out of the way of a fireball? Then the aliens are hostile. Is it a movie where careful, academic exploration of alien culture and ways of life is conducted? The aliens are not hostile. Does the alien befriend a child? I’m 50/50 on that between E.T. and Psycho Goreman, two movies with that premise that go two VERY different ways.
But, if we look at it from the perspective of the characters in a movie, they are NOT in a movie (as far as they know) and so only have the actions of the aliens to go on.
ET, for example, was a movie where I always felt like the adults were being total assholes. But as I’ve aged, I don’t think it’s totally unreasonable to be concerned about your kids hanging out with a alien. If conquistadors and explorers brought horrible diseases that decimated native populations in America, it seems VERY possible that ET could bring something similar, no? At the very least, seems very possible that ET would be heavily irradiated after traveling through deep space.
I end up on the “blow up the aliens” side because, well, I usually end up preferring those movies. ET is good as fuck, but Mac and Me and the others are garbage. And, yes, Independence Day is also kinda garbage, but it’s the kind of garbage I can get into.”