I’ve enjoyed SyFy’s weird-things-happening-in-the-world-we-think-we-know shows like Eureka and Warehouse 13, but I sort of thought TNT and Fox stole a bit of a match on the network with shows like Falling Skies and Terra Nova that were based further in the future and did more to posit alternative societies. So I’m excited to hear about Deliverance, SyFy’s upcoming program set in “a world where humans and aliens live together on a planet ravished by decades of war.” Apparently, it’s kind of a western, with a human sheriff and mayor trying to keep peace between the human and alien populations of the former St. Louis.

My boredom with alien invasion stories is well-documented, so this is a nice variation, and the first pop culture product of its ilk since District 9, really. Cowboys and Aliens foundered in part, I think, because it didn’t have a clear sense for who or what its alien invaders were meant to represent. An old-school Western with aliens standing in for George Hearst and his minions, a kind of sci-fi Deadwood would have been sort of amazing, but Cowboys and Aliens was not that thing. The fact that humans are in charge of governance in Deliverance suggests that humans are somewhat more powerful than aliens, but I do think you could do something interesting where aliens are the more powerful constituency without being tyrannical or enslaving humanity. And a situation where aliens and humans are close to parity or co-dependent could be a really useful tool for exploring our attitudes towards immigrants or to coalition-building across constituencies. Stories are better when they know what their metaphors are for specifically, rather than standing in for a Random Big Bad Thing.

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 had some high hopes for Cowboys and Aliens. I don’t think it’s a particularly good movie, though it does fulfill at least some of Jon Favreau’s promises to make a non-revisionist movie about the Blood Meridian. But mostly it made me wish that rather than mashing up two genres, Favreau had left science fiction on the table and made a straightforward, racially-aware Western.

The aliens half of the movie isn’t particularly interesting. The main titular extraterrestrials turn out to be just another set of periodic table aliens — this time, the element they’re after, for no particularly discernable reason other than that it’s thematically appropriate, is gold. The extra creature from another planet in the mix, of course, turns out to be Olivia Wilde, who is neither motivated by precious metals nor encumbered, as it turns out, by the laws of mortality. Her motivations rest on a few lines of dialogue, and the invaders are only slightly more detailed, though we do know that they’re awfully good at building multi-purpose mining and defense vehicles that blend in with rock formations in the American Southwest. Similarly, Daniel Craig remains one of our great action heroes, a man who can plausibly take as much as he dishes out, but there just isn’t much to him. In a sense, both he and the aliens are a distraction from the much better plain Western going on around them.

The Western bits fare better, if imperfectly, because they tell a few basic stories, that of a boy and his dog, a man and a shotgun, and of a father and his two sons. The first is perfunctory: from the minute Col. Dolarhyde hands young Emmett Taggart a blade and tells him “Take the knife, be a man,” we know he will earn a place in his community through the more contemporarily acceptable method of stabbing the hell out of an alien, rather than an Indian. Much in the same way, the town’s emasculated barkeep, Doc, who is married to a Mexican woman, starts the movie humiliated before the entire town, his glasses literally kicked in the dust, and ends it a confident shot and a confident husband.

The third storyline is the most moving, and the most socially relevant of those three strains. Though Col. Dolarhyde goes a bit too quickly from a brutal cattle rancher to a hometown hero, his storyline poses an interesting question: what happens if you love the son you adopt better than the one of your blood? Particularly if he’s of another race? The movie’s momentum begins when the colonel’s blood son, Percy, wanders into town and starts shooting the place up, with special emphasis on humiliating Doc. When he goes too far, Nat, an Apache man who is part of Dolarhyde’s circle, tries to step up to keep Percy out of custody, and fails. And when the feckless, brutal Percy is snapped up by the alien invaders, Nat steps up to help the townsfolk go after him and everyone else who was taken.
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And I thought it was some goofy-lookin’ nonsense about Daniel Craig and a very expensive piece of jewelry. Jon Favreau tells io9:

We’re not revisionist historians here. There is a lot of talk about people killing people and the Apaches and the scalps. We started off with images from the Blood Meridian right off the top. It’s a dark world. Harrison Ford’s story about what he witnessed as a child with the atrocities committed upon the settlers and the Indians are saying all these terrible things have come from the white people … and they’re [both] right.

Instead of making it like they’re all playing nice together and they happen to be friends right off the bat … even Harrison Ford and Adam Beach — who clearly have a very strong bond, stronger in many ways than he does with his own son — he’s conflicted about that feeling. But yet, in his heart, he still looked after him like a son and is seen as such.

Who knew? After a summer where race is left out of a movie about the struggles of the ’60s, and Captain America blithely ignores the unintegrated realities of the American Army in World War II, it’s refreshing to hear a director call revisionism by its name and express hopes of avoiding it. I don’t think this movie, or every movie, has to be about aggressively forcing viewers to confront the difficult truths in America’s past, but accepting the truth for what it is and building your fictional world in response to it and in acknowledgement of it is good practice, and good storytelling. Conflict is generally more interesting than whitewash.