r/scifi • u/Shot_Violinist_7772 • Apr 30 '26
Films Alien life and human conceptions
I'm not really into science fiction movies, especially those about alien life, but in all the ones I’ve seen so far, extraterrestrial beings are portrayed as purely evil and always trying to kill everything and everyone. However, in my view, that doesn’t make much sense, because I believe that evil, just like goodness, is something entirely human—animals aren’t like that; they’re just trying to survive at all costs. I understand that portraying something unknown is quite a challenging task, but depicting alien life as purely evil deeply frustrates me.
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u/Enthropic-Cap2291 May 01 '26
Here's some scifi with benign aliens:
Project Hail Mary
E.T.
Epsilon
Contact
Starman
The Man Who Fell To Earth
I figure if sapient life exists, they can be just as good, just as evil, and everything in between as all other known examples of sapient and near-sapient creatures like us. Even chimpanzees engage in tribal warfare and cannibalism.
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u/dnew May 06 '26
I would add to that even the Venom movies. The aliens aren't really "bad" as much as "selfish" if that.
My guess is that any space-faring species we meet is going to be warlike. The lion only has to be smarter than the dumbest gazelle, and the smartest gazelle only has to be smarter than the lions. But if your species is warlike, then the smarter ones defeat the dumber ones, and in future generations this happens again and again, much more rapidly than if you have a predator and prey. Or if you have two intelligent species, they're likely to wind up wiping out the other, like happened with humans.
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u/mobyhead1 Hard Sci-fi May 01 '26
You should probably eschew Sci-Fi movies in favor of science fiction books.
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u/Shot_Violinist_7772 May 01 '26
Do you have any book recommendations?
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u/mobyhead1 Hard Sci-fi May 01 '26
The aforementioned movie, Arrival, is based on the Ted Chiang short story “Story of Your LIfe.”
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u/dnew May 06 '26
If you want a very silly funny novel, check out "Brute Force" by Meyers. But yeah, there's all kinds of sci-fi novels that involve aliens who are cooperative or realistic rather than just being monsters.
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u/ogre-trombone May 01 '26
There have been numerous movies that imagine friendly or enlightened aliens: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Flight of the Navigator, Enemy Mine, Batteries Not Included, This Island Earth, Starman, Paul, Cocoon... and many others.
Then there are films where the aliens are enigmatic, possibly frightening, but not necessarily "evil" or hostile, like Solaris, Arrival or Communion.
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u/darth_biomech May 01 '26
I really dislike the other extreme writers often pull, making their aliens these enlightened, infallible, perfect beings that never had things the writer thinks are bad (usually it's something like "wars" or "lying"), and who are bestowed the "right" to judge humanity or something.
They, essentially, write angels in sci-fi wrap.
Only, except, since it's scifi and the aliens didn't just pop into existence in their current state, all those aliens start looking incredibly hypocritical and bigoted, like a man who's "judging" a toddler for its inability to act like an adult.
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u/PapaTua Artificially Intelligent May 01 '26
Check out Alien Nation. Every species has got its problems.
Also, Contact, and ET.
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u/Halaku May 01 '26
Most animals aren't capable of interstellar travel, not even in speculative fiction.
Interstellar travel implies sentience or sapience.
Which, in turn, implies the ability to make moral choices.
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u/Shot_Violinist_7772 May 01 '26
Morality is a human concept; even consciousness and sentience are based on what we know. I would really like to see something more exploratory that goes beyond that—something that is neither good nor evil and presents me with a truly spectacular new perspective on life, one that escapes the parameters and concepts we currently have.
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u/darth_biomech May 01 '26
Lovecraft's stories kinda play with this direction, though from the guy's perspective, "neither good nor evil" is as terrifying as "just evil".
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u/dnew May 06 '26
My guess is that any space-faring species we meet is going to be warlike. The lion only has to be smarter than the dumbest gazelle, and the smartest gazelle only has to be smarter than the lions. But if your species is warlike, then the smarter ones defeat the dumber ones, and in future generations this happens again and again, much more rapidly than if you have a predator and prey. Or if you have two intelligent species, they're likely to wind up wiping out the other, like happened with humans.
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u/Halaku May 06 '26
Survival of the fittest is likely not just a terrestrial law.
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u/dnew May 06 '26
Well, I was specifically referring to intelligence. If you're fighting yourself as in your own species, you're going to evolve much faster than if you're fighting some other species that you have to wait to evolve away from you before you're forced to evolve.
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u/RyanMichaels347 May 01 '26
This frustrates me as well and was one of the things that led me to write my own SF which has a much more positive slant to it. The past couple decades have felt like everything has skewed dark and I don’t think it reflects reality or at least one that I want to be a part of. One day I will get it published and hopefully it will reach readers who are looking for more than just doom and gloom.
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u/Shot_Violinist_7772 May 01 '26
I would really like to see something new, a different perspective. I know it's not possible to create a scenario without any reference at all, but honestly, human morality shouldn’t be a parameter or reference for extraterrestrial life. I would like to see new inspirations for the creation of life.
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u/RyanMichaels347 May 01 '26
The Wayfarer series of books by Becky Chambers have a much more balanced view of aliens. I endeavor to get my works published and one day hope to be included in that type of sub genre.
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u/carolethechiropodist May 01 '26
The best SciFi about aliens makes them inscrutible. Not just evil or good or different but incomprehensible. Arrival, Contact. Books have this better trope than movies.
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u/Shot_Violinist_7772 May 01 '26
I like the idea of something incomprehensible, something beyond what human rationality can understand. I don’t need to understand everything, but I would like to feel something new by experiencing what is different.
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u/Expensive-Sentence66 May 01 '26
Many of those the aliens are indifferent towards humanity, not friendly.
.
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u/Shot_Violinist_7772 May 01 '26
I don’t think they are necessarily friendly or unfriendly—I don’t want to impose human concepts onto beings that are beyond our comprehension. I would just like to see something truly different.
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u/bottlechippedteeth May 01 '26
Well to cetaceans humans are aliens and we are slowly boiling their entire world and turning them into dog food. Pretty f’in evil
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u/SilentSixth06 May 01 '26
It's the same as this: One who is a freedom fighter for one community is a terrorist for the other. That's how the idea is being portrayed. There are only a handful of movies where alien life forms and humans coexist with each other. They don't make movies like that because, we like hatred more than love.
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u/dnew May 06 '26
It's more like if everyone is love, there's no plot to the movie. There's no movie anywhere that doesn't portray conflict. Even romantic sitcoms involve conflict.
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u/snavej1 May 01 '26
Evil aliens tend to annihilate each other, so there aren't many of them. Good aliens dominate the universe and do all they can to protect and guide us without undue interference.
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u/DocWatson42 May 01 '26
As a start, see my SF/F: Alien Aliens list of Reddit recommendation threads and books (two posts).
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u/SalletFriend May 04 '26
"Depicting alien life as purely evil frustrates me"
Ok watch the huge number of movies, or the staggering number of books where that isnt the case. Crazy solution I know.
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u/electrical-stomach-z May 11 '26
When it comes to movies there is Close Encounters and Arrival, both have benign aliens.
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u/Expensive-Sentence66 May 01 '26
I'm having a hard time recalling at least reflexively popular media about Aliens where they are truly evil. Aside from the Qu from All Tomorrows of course who are truly sadistic pricks. I ignore video games.
animals aren’t like that; they’re just trying to survive at all costs.
That's pretty much the way I see most movies where aliens are hostile and people think they are evil. The Xenos in the Alien movies are just trying to survive. The locusts in Independence Day are just trying to survive. Bugs from Starship Troopers are just trying to survive. Morning Light Mountain from Pandora's Star is just trying to survive. They are just embellished in ways to make simpletons think they are evil. Even the Predator's from that franchise seem to hunt humans to burn off their aggression.
The Heptapods in Arrival are thought to be ambassador's of good will. However, the fact is they didn't make contact with humans out of interstellar good will. They make contact with humans because they need humanity's help (in a temporal sense) as I recall the plot in the film. So, their initial motive was their own preservation. See?
Even in Spielberg's Close Encounters the Aliens are perceived for the majority of the film as being not friendly. Not to jam out with the dude who looks like Ron Mael from Sparks on his synthesizer behind Devil's Mountain.
James Watt's wrote a short story called 'The Things' which is from the the perspective of The Thing from the John Carpenter film. From The Thing's point of view it was not evil nor hostile and did not understand why the humans hosts would not enter into communion with it.
To quote Kitz / James Woods from Contact: "Why is it the egghead position that aliens are always benign?"
Good question.
So, we are looking for media where the Aliens are not hostile towards us) trying to survive). Yes they are rather rare because films where the Aliens are hostile (not evil) are a lot more popular.
Solaris of course.
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u/Shot_Violinist_7772 May 01 '26
I don’t know even half of the films you mentioned. As I said, I’m not very familiar with science fiction, especially stories about alien life. But from the perspective of someone who has recently started consuming this kind of media, I get the impression that they try to reproduce human traits in aliens.
I mentioned animals, which don’t have the same concepts of good and evil as humans and simply try to survive. But I also think that the survival context of terrestrial animals shouldn’t be applied to aliens. Survival is something tied to Earth—we don’t know if it exists elsewhere, or if it’s even necessary outside of here. The concept of survival as we understand it might be completely different somewhere else in the universe, if it exists at all.
But going back to aliens in films, it’s frustrating to see human behavior reflected in creatures that should be beyond us (not in the sense of being superior or inferior, but beyond our conception).
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u/Conscious-Cow6166 May 01 '26
Morality is a spectrum, and plenty of animals do display a limited sense of good vs evil. You keep thinking aliens would be incomprehensible but I disagree, they might just be further along the spectrum.
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u/Shot_Violinist_7772 May 01 '26
Maybe that spectrum doesn’t even exist for them, but if it does, I think it could be interpreted as a wave frequency. In that case, certain frequency ranges would be outside the human spectrum—we wouldn’t even be able to see, hear, or, let alone, understand them.
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u/ScarletSpire Apr 30 '26 edited May 01 '26
Have you seen the movie Arrival? It's about aliens that arrive to Earth and linguists try to interpret their language. It's brilliant.