The Black List, a list of the best unshot scripts of any given year, as picked by a group of almost 300 film executives, came out yesterday afternoon. Reading through it, I was struck by some trends—lots of scripts by guys, lots of bank robberies, lots of science fiction but almost almost no fantasy. But I was intrigued by a lot of the projects on the list, and these ten which most caught my eye are just a few of the scripts that seek out political resonance, or have settings like the Dust Bowl or Bleeding Kansas.

Script: Rodham
Author: Young Il Kim
Description: “During the height of the Watergate scandal, rising star Hillary Rodham is the youngest lawyer chosen for the House Judiciary Committee to Impeach Nixon, but she soon finds herself forced to choose between a destined path to the White House and her unresolved feelings for Bill Clinton, her former boyfriend who now teaches law in Arkansas.”
Why I’m Curious: Hillary Rodham Clinton is a fascinating figure. And people have asked for years why she chose to stay with Bill Clinton, it’s an intriguing question how she chose him, and life in Arkansas, in the first place. There are a lot of movies that attempt to capture election zeitgeists, and I wouldn’t be remotely surprised to see Harvey Weinstein snap this one up for a 2016 release. But this is a smarter-than-usual way to approach a figure about whom so much has written that it seems like nothing new could be revealed.

Script: Story Of Your Life
Author: Eric Heisserer
Description: “Based on the short story by Ted Chiang. When alien crafts land around the world, a linguistics expert is recruited by the military to determine whether they come in peace or are a threat. As she learns to communicate with the aliens, she begins experiencing vivid flashbacks that become the key to unlocking the greater mystery about the true purpose of their visit.”
Why I’m Curious: I’ve written about my obsessions with smart, alternative alien invasion scenarios over and over again. It’s been fifteen years since Contact, the last great movie about trying to talk to aliens instead of immediately going to war with them, and three years since District 9. We are long overdue.

Script: Shut In
Author: Christina Hodson
Description: “A woman who tries to raise her catatonic son on her own suddenly discovers a shocking secret about him.”
Why I’m Curious: Since Adam Lanza shot his mother, Nancy, before heading off to massacre students and administrators at Sandy Hook Elementary, there’s been renewed attention to mothers raising difficult children by themselves face, and what kind of support we could give them. I’m curious to see a strong psychological portrait that examines those kinds of challenges.

Script: Man Of Tomorrow
Author: Jeremy Slater
Description: “In an alternate 1940s reality, the US Government makes a deal with an indestructible gangster to kill Hilter in exchange for the city of Chicago, which he will build into his own utopia. Unfortunately his model city never comes to fruition and both he and his Bureau liaison get much of the slack for destroying one of America’s greatest cities and now the government wants him dead.”
Why I’m Curious: Urban planning, alternate history, and killing Hitler? I’m so game.
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I very much want to like SyFy’s Defiance, its new alien-invasion story, which is set to arrive on the network in April of next year, but this initial trailer has me feeling somewhat uncertain:

On the plus side, I appreciate that SyFy is selling that what happens when an alien and human culture meld is one of the things that makes the show distinct and worth watching. I want to know what it means that “It wasn’t exactly Earth anymore. Something new had been created.” That sense of our planet not being precisely Earth anymore, and that question of how humans and aliens will deal with each other once the possibility of staying separated is gone, was what made District 9 such a fantastic movie. Defiance could be an opportunity to move closer to those points of conversion than District 9 was. In District 9, the people who had commercial and sexual relationships with aliens were black Africans, rather than people like our white protagonist, immigrants rather than South Africans, criminals rather than citizens. It would be interesting to have a show that interrogates what it’s like to cross over those boundaries, to feel friendship, or attraction, or love for someone who is profoundly other, to have a show grant the other that humanity at all, rather than to keep those interactions, that mingling of worlds, at a distance.

But on the other hand, Defiance is being released in conjunction with a video game, and from this footage, looks it. These are some very cheesy-looking alien invaders. And the fact that Defiance isn’t just comfortable telling a society-building story and is continuing the invasion is worrisome. If you feel like the world you’re placing your characters in isn’t interesting enough without posing holdouts on Helm’s Deep-like battlements, that the conversations your characters will have are less engaging than CGI-shootouts, you have a problem.

The bridge is yours.

-Stock sitcom plots that no one makes anymore.

-Angela Bassett as Storm in an X-Men movie directed by Kathryn Bigelow would have been the greatest of all things.

-Is this the next huge dystopian YA series?

-Because Battleship didn’t make little enough sense already.

-Can we all agree the Emmys miniseries category has no plausible definition for what qualifies to compete in it?

-Morgan Spurlock goes to Comic Con:

I’ve written a great deal about how unfortunate it is that alien invasions are the main first contact scenarios we get in the movie, both because it’s unrealistic that we’d hold up for long enough for it to be interesting (much less win), and because there are so many more fascinating culture clash alternatives out there. But Nick Sagan, Carl’s son and a writer and producer in his own right, has some smart thoughts about one of the hoariest cliches in the invasion story—the idea that if aliens showed up, we’d forget our differences:

We’re so bitterly divided these days, the appearance of a true “other” might be the best chance of bringing us all together. But I wonder. If a fleet of alien ships appeared in the sky tomorrow, how do you think those who now call our president a Kenyan Marxist Muslim atheist would be most likely to react? Sure, they might turn around and say, “Whatever we may not like about Barack Hussein Obama, he’s as human as we are and we better put aside our differences to beat back these damn aliens!” I think the more likely reaction would be, “He’s probably one of them and it’s his fault they’re here!” Likewise, had a flying saucer invasion force descended during the tail end of George W. Bush’s presidency, I rather doubt the world community would have happily united behind his leadership. What’s more, these hypothetical extraterrestrials are unlikely to sit idly by as we try to figure out how best to move past our various differences. Human divisions would be child’s play for any reasonably competent alien overlord to exploit — check the masterful Twilight Zone episode “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” for an example of how that might play out.

Using this as a jumping-off point, I can think of a couple of scenarios I’d love to see a science fiction movie explore:

1. If, in fact, we put aside our national differences and repelled an alien attack: What comes afterwards? District 9 explored this question on a small scale—white and black South Africans healed, or at least put aside, the deep rift of racism when aliens showed up, and employed the formidable machinery of apartheid to take it out on them. What lines might we team up along? What undesirables might we eliminate? Would we cure AIDS? Or kill a lot of poor people?

2. The arms race: If aliens invaded, but without the intent of waging total war, the effort to win them over as allies (if we could figure out what they wanted) would set off an all-time bonkers global competition. Can you imagine what would happen if aliens showed up and decided to throw their lot in with, say, Nigeria? The scramble it would set off and the global realignment would be fascinating, and deeply strange.

3. The reformers: To be fair, we are messing up our stuff pretty badly. So what if an alien species that, say, has an aesthetic attachment to our planet, shows up and tries to force us to stop? Would we play fair? Would we freak out and obey out of awe? Or would we split between folks who are grateful and folks who are profoundly resistant?

A new paper positing some scenarios for first contact between humans and extraterrestrials, whether it’s Megyn Kelly erroneously saying that NASA funded it or Dan Foster mocking the authors for assuming that more advanced societies will naturally be progressive. Ignored in all this hoopla is that the paper’s chock-full of scenarios that would make for awesome alien movies that go beyond the derivative invasion scenarios that were so popular this year. Here are five of my favorites:

1. Some of us discover we’re being kept under alien observation, and we reach out to make first contact, with…interesting results. The Prime Directive has the Federation refraining from messing with new societies, but what if we’re the society someone else is trying not to interfere with? Contact was the last major movie to explore what would happen if other species are waiting for us to grew up, but stopped short of exploring the implications of humanity reaching out in the universe:

The intentional form of this solution is sometimes known as the Zoo Hypothesis because it implies that ETI are treating Earth like a wildlife preserve to be observed but not fully incorporated into the Galactic Club…The Zoo Hypothesis thus implies that ETI could make contact with humans at any time. Perhaps such stealthy ETI will reveal themselves once Earth civilization has reached certain milestones. They may be waiting until we have reached a sufficient level of sophistication as a society such as the start of a METI program or the discovery of light speed travel, or they could be applying a societal benchmark such as sustainable development or international unity.

2. A two-sided story about two groups of people trying to get in touch with each other. Flip the perspective, and show both human and alien societies stumbling towards each other. Would require actual creative world-building to make the aliens, their society, and motivations feel as rich and compelling as our own, but those are good things to strive for:

Even if ETI exist in the nearby galactic vicinity, this does not necessarily imply that communication with them will be possible or straightforward. One major challenge is selecting the frequency at which to broadcast and listen. The electromagnetic spectrum consists of a continuum of wavelengths for communication that includes radio, microwave, infrared, visible, ultraviolet, and x-ray bands. Searching this entire range is a monumental and nearly impossible task, so we choose particular wavelengths that seem more probable for interstellar communication.

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I don’t think Falling Skies is the show to end all shows, but it does satisfy a craving I’ve had for a look at alien invasions that don’t just consist of a traumatic invasion that’s easily repulsed once humans figure out the aliens’ fatal weakness. Instead, it dispenses with the history of the invasion in a monologue by a group of children in the first minute and a half of the pilot: “I was in school when the ships came. They were really big. And they said we weren’t going to attack them with a nuclear bomb because they might want to be friends. But they didn’t want to be friends. Not at all…They blew up army bases, ships, the Navy, submarines, and all the soldiers are gone…Now the moms and dads have to fight…They kill parents. And they put harnesses on kids.” And then the show moves swiftly and efficiently into the question of what happens to individual humans and human society when it’s on the brink of extinction.

There are fairly obvious compromises. A criminal can be a useful addition to society if he knows how to cook, bringing some solace to everyday life — and if he’s developed a better theory of fighting the invaders. We’ll tolerate deviant behavior by doctors if they lead to medical innovation that can be an effective response to new threats. Shreds of normality, like a skateboard, can unify entire communities. Thank God America manufactured so much canned food.

But one of the things that’s most interesting to me so far is the debate over whether academic knowledge and theory or military expertise matter more in the current environment. That conflict’s embodied by Tom Mason (Noah Wyle, finally finding a decent outlet for his penchant for playing bookish action heroes), a military history professor, and Captain Weaver (Will Patton), an actual veteran of both the armed forces and the military reserves. Mason’s not a fantastic commander: he gets his squad captured, he brings back an alien prisoner of war without a sense of whether it’ll be feasible or wise to hold one, and it’s not necessarily clear that his theories about whether the Skitters (as the invaders are known) can be harassed off Earth the same way the British were harassed out of the colonies during the Revolutionary War carry water. But Mason does understand that in order to win, the human survivors need more than a military campaign, telling one of his fellow survivors, “I think civilians are a liability and a hindrance. I also think they’re the best motivation we have to fight.” When he has to choose what books he wants to take with him, he picks A Tale of Two Cities.
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Reason‘s Peter Suderman and I sat down on Friday to tape an episode of Bloggingheads that ranges from the political uses of X-Men to Super 8 as Steven Spielberg cover band. I didn’t get a chance to go this weekend, but I’d be curious to know what those of you who saw Super 8 think of Peter’s assessment:

Charlie Jane Anders’ post on the rising tide of alien invasion movies and asymmetric warfare is awesome great, and I encourage you to read the whole thing. But I want to quibble a bit with a couple of points she makes towards the end of what I think is an otherwise excellent argument:

We know, deep down, that we may one day be on the other side of this equation, that the United States won’t be the world’s main superpower forever. Past superpowers have often only realized their new status when they suddenly faced a sudden, damaging assault from a rising power. Plus, as the main power on the receiving end of asymmetric warfare, we can’t really understand it unless we see it from the other side.

Science fiction is also uniquely suited to talking about the realities of post-Cold War fighting, because so much of asymmetric warfare deals with a technological superiority on one side. The idea of how you cope with a technological strategic advantage is one that science fiction can easily dramatize, because alien technologies are automatically going to be awesome and incomprehensible. (And on the real side, any alien race with the ability to travel interstellar distances to visit Earth is going to be massively more powerful than we are.)

First, I think we’re more likely to end up in a bi- or multi-polar world than we are in a uni-polar world where the United States is not the dominant nation. That’s where movies like District 9, but on a much larger scale, would be interesting—there’s no question that an alien invasion that humanity successfully repulsed would fundamentally reshape our society, likely making the world both more unified across national lines, and more militaristic a la an Ender’s Game scenario. But it would also likely make us cling more fiercely to our humanness in the face of its potential annihilation. Humanity in general and the U.S. in particular would probably change more if we shifted into an uneasy coexistence with an alien society where technological and cultural exchange were possible, but potentially politically taboo.

Second, while the U.S. probably will be less geopolitically powerful in the future, isn’t there an extent to which taking on the underdog role in alien movies sort of absolves us of our role as an invader? Right now, we are fighting two actual asymmetric wars, using technological strategic advantages like predator drones. A movie about a human invasion or colonization of an alien planet might be a more accurate way to process American emotions about our military superiority and the kinds of things we do with it.

And finally, one thing that’s worth mentioning is that in asymmetric wars, the smaller, less conventionally powerful party to the conflict can still find powerful ways to fight back. Whether you’re flying planes into buildings or making very effective use of Improvised Explosive Devices, asymmetric warfare often spurs strategic and technological innovation on both sides of the conflict (see the valorization of hacking in Independence Day). One of the things that’s irritating about so many alien invasion movies is how quickly they’re resolved. Do we really think a society capable of interstellar travel and planet seizure is stupid enough to get beaten up by a bunch of council housing kids in the U.K., as awesome as that scenario is? Or to invade via Los Angeles rather than taking out command centers and nuclear weapons stockpiles first? No, if humanity doesn’t just surrender immediately, this is likely to be a protracted quagmire, the kind of thing that produces actual innovation and strategic shifts. It might involve less of Will Smith punching aliens in the face, or whatever, but it would probably make for better storytelling.