For Hollywood, which has a science fiction tradition, there are countless dramas with aliens as the protagonists. As large as classic dramas such as "Star Trek" that have been recorded in the memory of generations, to small shoddy dramas that are not well known in late-night slots, there is no shortage of aliens.
Therefore, it is not easy to borrow this element to regain the favor of fans. However, there is a recent sand sculpture science fiction drama that makes many netizens shine -
Alien Inhabitants
Douban and IMDB scored 8.3 points in unison, Rotten Tomatoes freshness as high as 93%, since "Alien Catastrophe", the science fiction drama field has not seen such a strong word-of-mouth battle for a long time.
However, unlike the latter, "Alien Residents" did not intend to use the theme of the lofty building to impress the fans, but concocted a comic comedy with a skeleton in a cool drama mode.
The story of this play has to start with a tragic alien. He originally only wanted to carry out the orders of the home planet and destroy humans, but unexpectedly, shortly after arriving on Earth, the spacecraft was struck by lightning and wandered to a place called "Quiet Town" in Colorado.
Due to the scattered parts of the spacecraft and the loss of the device that destroyed humans, the alien had to go to a deserted apartment to find a place to live, but he met a doctor named Harry, and in the conflict, he accidentally killed the other party.
After that, the aliens transformed into Harry's form and fled to human society for a temporary survival.
For the next four months, he traveled to the snow during the day with metal detectors to search for ship wreckage; at night, he learned human language and customs by watching the American drama "Law and Order."
It wasn't until the sheriff of Serenity suddenly found harry the alien ("Harry") and asked him to perform an autopsy on a murder that had taken place in the town that he had to start contacting human society.
Harry thought he had a superior IQ, but when communicating with humans, his ultra-low emotional intelligence made him look like a fool. More crucially, with a one in a million chances of being recognized by humans, Harry was seen through by the little boy Max in this small town with a population of only a thousand.
"Trouble" and so on.
Invited by the mayor to act as the town doctor, the bar girl Darcy has a secret heart for him, the mysterious agent waits for the opportunity to investigate, and the human Harry's body is accidentally found. Harry is like Xu Lang in "Tai 囧", but he just wants to destroy mankind, but he can always encounter the unexpected "Wang Bao", and things continue to happen.
In addition, the show also arranged the heroine Asta's family clues, telling the Indian nurse and her adoptive father and biological daughter emotional bondage, as a soft emotional side of the series, so that Harry's homesickness and this entanglement, forming a linkage effect.
It can be said that "Alien Residents" uses the accident that Harry encountered at the beginning to set up suspense throughout the play: When will Harry assemble the spaceship and destruction device? Will he carry out the "extinction plan"? These suspense and mysteries are mixed with sand sculpture plots, so that this drama always has a good drama and point of view.
As a well-conceived science fiction drama, Alien Resident is not original, but is based on the comic of the same name co-created by Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse, which was serialized by Dark Horse Comics in 2012 and has completed five mini-works, the sixth of which is also coming to an end.
Hogan and Parkhouse are old partners, having worked on five issues of Dreamland for Vertigo Comics as early as 1999. When the two began to create works based on aliens, Hogan was extremely disgusted by the idea of depicting aliens as monsters or invaders in the past, and he wanted to show the state of human existence from a non-human perspective.
To that end, they drew inspiration from films and television titles such as David Lynch's Twin Peaks, Nicholas Roig's Alien, and Donald Petri's Alien Check-in. In addition, DC Comics' chameleon boy, released in the 1960s, directly became the source of alien images and abilities in Alien Residents.
Therefore, the comic version of "Alien Residents" has been widely acclaimed since its launch in 2012, and many film and television companies want to buy the rights to its film and television drama adaptations. The opportunity eventually fell to SYFY, one of NBC's cable channels, a television channel that specializes in streaming series on sci-fi, fantasy, thriller, supernatural and other genres.
SYFY's management knew that if Alien Resident wanted to explode, it had to go in a grotesque comedy style, so they hired Chris Sheridan, the screenwriter who had worked on the animated comedy Evergreen "House of Spoofs", and put him in charge of the adaptation and production of the script.
Indeed, judging from the current short comment area of Douban, most of the fans of the drama have been poisoned by its sand sculpture to force the wind, and they have been applauded one after another.
For example, shortly after the first episode began, when the sheriff asked Harry to investigate the cause of death of the deceased, Harry was like a character in Law and Order, and when he faced Asta, who was just sleeping, he opened his mouth and claimed that the woman in front of him had died for at least six hours, but Harry just sniffed it with his nose.
In the second episode, a montage showing Harry adapting to the human body is hilarious. Squeeze toothpaste all over your face; read pictures of Anne Hathaway in magazines to learn the art of laughing; and crush your glass while drinking water. This middle-aged man in his forties can always make funny and stupid moves like a baby.
This style of sand sculpture is due to the credit of screenwriter Sheridan on the one hand, and the superb acting skills of the actor who plays Harry, Alan Tudek, on the other hand.
Although Tudek is not a well-known male star, his comedic performance style is a system of its own, often unforgettable with its flexible and strange voice acting. He has performed in the "Zootopia", "Super Marines", and "Frozen" series, and won the 40th Animated Annie Award for Best Voiceover for "Invincible Destruction King".
The male protagonist in this play has a large number of inner monologues, so that Tudek can give full play to his vocal charm, with the distortion of the timbre, the ups and downs of the tone, interpreting the rich inner changes of this alien, and jokes are often produced.
In addition, in order to play Harry's sluggish, stiff, and upright manners as an alien, Tudek claims to have benefited greatly from the experience of tweaking clowns. He sees Harry as a curious person who learns all aspects of humanity, both mechanically on the physical level and communicatively on an emotional level.
That's why we can feel the cuteness of Harry as an alien in Alien Residents, an alien freak who combines bad thoughts and sluggishness.
However, if we only treat "Alien Residents" with the attitude of watching cool dramas, we obviously miss a masterpiece that explores the value of human nature. Similar to Ridley Scott's Prometheus, Alien Inhabitants is actually a story of a Creator trying to destroy his creation.
In the play, there is a detail that Harry, as an alien, complains that he helped build Stonehenge. It is not difficult to see that the alien race to which Harry belongs is likely to be the so-called "Creator".
Harry's coming to Earth this time with the intention of destroying mankind with the "Extinction Plan" device is an act of "slaughtering descendants".
However, unlike "Prometheus", the play does not interpret the apocalyptic revelation in a pessimistic manner, but depicts the warm pulse of the human world with absurd brushstrokes, as well as the meaning and value of human existence as a result.
For example, when Harry existed in the molecular structure of humans for too long, he gradually had a human emotional experience. When he psychotherapy for the mayor of the town and hears the other person describe the emptiness and loneliness as "the stomach begins to sink into a pit", Harry can empathize with it, it is a kind of nostalgia for his hometown, a wisp of sorrow that has no kind of people around him.
Or when he saw the Indian reservation where Asta was located, the sense of intimacy surrounding the extended family made him realize that it was not food that brought people together, but that each other gave each other a sense of belonging, which was a basic human need.
It can be said that the branch clues of each episode, the huge and complex characters, are actually prepared for Harry to experience the human world and look at human beings. Will Harry eventually obey the parent planet's arrangement, or will he be assimilated by humans? This ultimate question actually reflects human reflection and identification with itself.
And all of this is examined in this film from the perspective of an outsider. The title "Alien Inhabitants" not only refers to aliens, but according to the producers, it is also reflecting on the topic of "immigration", which is meaningful in the United States.
If the alien played by Harry is an explicit "immigrant", then there are too many characters in the film who are playing the role of hidden "immigrants".
The Indian ethnic group represented by Asta was originally Native American, but in today's American society, it is no different from other immigrants.
As the only black protagonist in the film, the black sheriff also feels lonely and marginalized, which is why he always makes others call him "Big Black". Because he loves the identity word "black" more than the name.
Whether it is the reflective identification of human emotions or the anxiety and confusion of "immigrant" identity, "Alien Residents" can always be presented in a playful and ridiculous way. Because, in the face of these questions that countless philosophers have not had an accurate answer to for thousands of years, the most important thing for us is not a constant answer, but a reason that allows us to think about the problem.
And "Alien Inhabitants" is exactly this interesting reason.
Flowers without feast