Not Every Apocalypse Is About YOU

  Please note that this week's film is in Spanish, with English subtitles  


A man wakes up in a strange woman's bed, the morning after a drunken one-night stand.

He's groggy and hungover. So is she. Neither of them has a clear memory of meeting, much less... anything else.

Everything is extremely awkward.



Still, it could be worse. I mean it's not like there's been an alien invasion or anything...


Oh. Wait.



The Aliens-Invade-Earth genre is practically as old as cinema itself. 


Aliens have come in all shapes and sizes. They have come in rockets; they have come in saucers. They have come in peace; they have come in human form. 

Sometimes they have come for our women.

But one thing has been generally universal. When the aliens come, the story is always about them.

Almost always.


Extraterrestrial is probably the least alien-invasion film you will ever see. Yes, the flying saucers have arrived, but no, the film isn't about that.


Written and directed by Nacho Vigalondo, Extraterrestrial was made on a micro budget and confines itself (mostly) to the couple trapped in their apartment in the aftermath of their one-night stand.

The aliens have invaded, but they have more immediate problems to deal with.


As far as I am aware, no aliens have actually invaded the Earth as yet (there was that one time in New Jersey, but we don't talk about that). But anyone watching Extraterrestrial in 2024 might be struck by its foreshadowing of the COVID lockdown (still nine years in the future when the film was released).

If COVID taught us anything, it taught us just how quickly social norms can collapse. It doesn't even take very much.


The aliens in Extraterrestrial don't actually need to do anything. They just show up. 

Everyone else does the rest.


We will screen Extraterrestrial at 7.30 on Thursday, the 5th of December at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.

Please note that Extraterrestrial is in Spanish, with English subtitles.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Carry On... #Don't Trust Anyone over 25

Image
Please note that this week's film has been rated  12  in the UK. Last week's film ( Logan's Run ) is a prime example of a science fiction film that was emphatically a product of the era in which it was made. If anything, its very relevance proved to be its vulnerability. By the time it reached the theatres in 1976, many of the social trends it was responding to were already starting to fade. That may also be why attempts to produce a remake have consistently failed to make any headway. Hollywood studios have repeatedly attempted to reboot Logan's Run over the decades, and at least six different directors have embarked on such a project over the last 30 years. Multiple writers have been approached, and in some cases have written complete screenplays - but to no avail. Logan's Run has remained stubbornly and imperviously un-remade. If you think about it (and I have, trust me) remaking Logan's Run is easier said than done. After a decade of hippie culture, you...
Read more

The Best Bond Film of All Time; Thursday the 14th of October

Image
 James Bond has been in the news quite a bit recently, following the much-delayed release of No Time to Die , the most recent offering in this (almost) 60-year-old film franchise. No time to die, indeed. Like all self-respecting zombies, the James Bond character is steadfastly refusing to lie down and stop breathing, despite (or perhaps because of) six decades of sexism, racism, casual violence, jingoism and sexism (sexism is a very big thing in the Bond franchise). It should really have been called  Enough Already. Still, the Bond Movie has become an important cultural icon, and each offering follows an instantly recognisable style and pattern: a suave hero in a tailored suit, a smooth-talking but quietly menacing villain with a dangerous and (devotedly) faithful henchman, a beautiful, sexually available girl, a wide variety of exotic and photogenic locations and an endless parade of increasingly complicated and implausible assassination attempts. What's not to love? With all...
Read more

The Feast of "Stephen"

Image
If you're a Christian, you might know "The Feast of Stephen" as St. Stephen's Day (the 26th of December) when young men dress up in vaguely nightmarish straw costumes and wander around the town playing alarming music while carrying a dead bird. This is not about that. If you're a Doctor Who fan, you might know The Feast of Stephen as the first ever Doctor Who Christmas episode (broadcast on Christmas Day in 1965).  This is not about that either. For our purposes this week, The Feast of Stephen  concerns a small but pivotal character in the beloved Noël Coward/David Lean classic Brief Encounter .  Brief Encounter is remembered today as perhaps the most famous unconsummated love affair in cinema history. Released in 1945 (but without so much as the slightest hint of a war or its effects) it tells the story of two (married) individuals who meet by chance on a train platform and proceed to teeter on the brink of having an affair for a few weeks. They do not, in fac...
Read more

Another Cold War Movie. A very, very Cold War Movie.

Image
 Last week we saw a film about the Cold War as seen by a director who experienced it as a young teenager. The International situation may have been apocalyptic and grim, but none of that mattered as much as the newest monster movie. This week is going to be another film about the Cold War, but viewed through the very different lens of a director in his mid-fifties who had lived through the eras of World War Two and The Holocaust. Billy Wilder may be (quite rightly) remembered for films like Sunset Boulevard, Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Some Like it Hot etc. but One, Two, Three is one of his most cynical, savage and unforgiving comedies. Berlin in 1961 was a divided city. The East and West were controlled by the Russians and Americans respectively, but travel between the two regions was still possible. It was in fact during the making of this film that the infamous wall went up, sealing East Berlin off from the West for almost thirty years. I'm not going to attempt to expl...
Read more

And So, the 70's...

Image
 Raging Riders, and Lots of Bull Depending on who you ask, the ten-year period of 1965-1975 was either one of the best eras in American cinema, or one of the worst. While it was certainly a Golden Age if you were a straight white male who loved extreme violence, casual sexism, xenophobia and homophobia, it was far less enjoyable if such things tended to make you uncomfortable. (Three guesses how I feel about this era.) To some extent, Cinema was merely reflecting the tone of Society itself during that decade. After living through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of  President Kennedy (and, two years later, Malcolm X; and a few years after that , Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King) there were the almost daily news reports of  violent suppression of  Civil Rights campaigners and (if you wanted some relief from the vicious and bloody domestic news) there was the ongoing horror show of the Vietnam War. Eventually of course the 1960s came to an end, and Ame...
Read more