If you like progressive history: Catch The Loving Story on HBO at 9PM EST tonight. The movie’s both a good recapitulation of the court case that bears the family’s name, and that made interracial relationships in America legal, a Valentine’s Day-worthy story if there ever was one. But it’s also a terrific portrait of the Lovings themselves, bolstered by archival footage of them and their lawyers. Sometimes, we need a reminder that without fiercely dedicated individuals facing up to illogic and inequality, history doesn’t move forward.

If you’re headed out to work on a campaign this cycle: Watch Definitely, Maybe, the rare multi-purpose romantic comedy that works both if you’re trying to keep a long-distance relationship going on the trail, or hoping to meet the person you’re destined to be with! Also if you have an adorable child who’s kind of like Abigail Breslin! But seriously, this is a deeply charming movie that’s rooted in the substance of campaign work. And it offers a nice rebuke to the romantic comedy ideal that there’s only one person that you’re meant to be with if only fate will cooperate—instead, Definitely, Maybe argues that you’ve got to do work to make it work.

If you’ve just started dating someone: Okay, so the movie may be weirdly romantic and optimistic about the role of lobbying in the policy-making process. But The American President is a pretty great movie about the early stages of seeing someone, whether it’s dinner invitations or picking out the right flowers to send your sweetie. Plus, you want to make a big gesture to a policy nerd? This is your template.

You need a reminder that political integrity is sexy: Dick is wildly underrated as a political movie. But it’s also a worthwhile reminder that a) even if you think the President is dreamy, you should weigh in his corruption and meanness to his dog when deciding that you have a crush on him, b) you should never commit your confessions of love to the tape recorder in Rose Mary Woods’ desk.

You’re looking for affirmation that love conquers all—even small towns: Issue movies are fantastic. But sometimes—and Valentine’s Day is such a occasion—there’s nothing wrong with wanting a little uplift. In that case, turn to Big Eden, which is all about what happens when you return to your hometown, work out your issues with your old crush, and find new love in a place you least expected it—and the romances just happen to be gay and interracial.

-Erik Kain talks to The Civil Wars about music and piracy.

-Hollywood takes on the recession phenomenon of adult kids moving back in with their parents.

-Cleverly vandalized Mad Men ads.

-Movie ticket prices hit a high in 2011.

-Morgan Freeman will be the latest celebrity to survive the apocalypse.

But patriotism doesn’t sell, right? If it did, Hollywood would be inundating movie theaters with pro-troop films and other tales of American soldiers in heroic action.
“Red Tails” also slices into another depressing Hollywood meme…An even better patriotism test comes next month when “Act of Valor,” a film which boldly toasts American soldiers as heroes, hits theaters. A “Valor” take down of the film competition may open the floodgates for more pro-troop features, assuming the appropriate bean counters are taking notes. Or, will Hollywood executives ignore the numbers and retreat to projects depicting U.S. soldiers in unflattering light? Is there a better chance we’ll see a new installment of “In the Valley of Elah” or “Redacted,” films showing the darker side of the modern soldier, than a “Red Tails” sequel?

I don’t want to spend time explaining why patriotism and unqualified support for the members and actions of the armed forces no matter what they do aren’t the same thing, because I think it’s obvious to everyone here and everyone reasonable why that’s the case. But I think there’s something fundamentally silly about the idea that Hollywood is unaware of the fact that patriotism sells.

In the last 10 years, the following movies with patriotic themes were among the top-10 grossing movies of the year. Last year, one of the top-selling superheroes of the year was Captain America, up there with Pixar’s most middle-American offering, Cars 2. In 2010, Iron Man 2 kept stumbling drunkenly towards public service. 2009 was ruled by Michael Bay’s military Valentine, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, along with the paen to charity and football as mainstreaming experiences, The Blind Side. In 2008, Tony Stark discovered service of country instead of himself in Iron Man. In 2007, Spider-Man 3, the latest installment about the webslinger who became a representative of post-9/11 New York, topped the box office list; the uber-pro-military franchise Transformers made its bow; Jason Bourne kept the idea of an intelligence community with integrity alive in The Bourne Ultimatum; and Will Smith saved human society in I Am Legend. The previous year, Clark Kent resurfaced to keep an eye on Metropolis in Superman Returns, and Hollywood affirmed a kinder, gentler American consumerism in Talladega Nights. 2005 had less obvious themes, though America obviously beats the Martians in War of the Worlds. 2004 reinforced Spider-Man’s ties to New York in that incredible subway scene. 2002 had Spider-Man topping the charts again, a celebration of the immigrant experience in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and more Americans v. the Aliens in Men in Black 2. 2001 was the last year a World War II movie cleaned up at the box office, but no one could accuse Pearl Harbor of being anything less than a big, old-fashioned patriotic weepie.

Even by the standards of military-worshipping conservatism, Hollywood is deeply committed to making movies that both reflect and make bank off that particular strand of patriotism. And if you’re thoughtful enough to have a broader understanding of love and country, there’s even more out there for you.

That’s one reason we want to fund startups that will compete with movies and TV, but not the main reason. The main reason we want to fund such startups is not to protect the world from more SOPAs, but because SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they’re resorting to such tactics. If movies and TV were growing rapidly, that growth would take up all their attention. When a striker is fouled in the penalty area, he doesn’t stop as long as he still has control of the ball; it’s only when he’s beaten that he turns to appeal to the ref. SOPA shows Hollywood is beaten. And yet the audiences to be captured from movies and TV are still huge. There is a lot of potential energy to be liberated there.

How do you kill the movie and TV industries? Or more precisely (since at this level, technological progress is probably predetermined) what is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What’s going to kill movies and TV is what’s already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now?

That’s a big task, and one that comes with formidable obstacles. First, there’s the cost. Hulu’s spending about $500 million on content in 2012. That’s the total cost of making Avatar, including investments in cameras and a $150 million marketing budget. There are other companies that are spending more money, Netflix among them, but that money is going to buy up access to back catalogues as well as to original programming. But the point’s clear: it will take time for rivals to rise up who can spend as much money creating and marketing products as Hollywood does. And while there’s certainly proof that you can make fascinating, visually engaging, and financially successful movies for less than Hollywood typically does (District 9, anybody?) you’re not going to put Hollywood out of business when you’re at a huge disadvantage in terms of making product and getting consumers interested in it.

Second, and relatedly, knowing how to distribute content isn’t the same thing as knowing how to produce it, or to spot what’s good about a project, or to know how to make it work. That means that organizations like Yahoo, Netflix, and Hulu, all tech companies that are producing original content, are going to have a learning curve in producing good material. Particularly if the reason to try to kill Hollywood stems more out of a distate for SOPA than for formulaic storytelling or the lock of straight white men on the industry in a way that limits storytelling. And they’re going to have to figure out how to get customers to consume it regularly without the predictability of a movie release calendar or a network. These challenges aren’t impossible to overcome, but they are a hurdle.

Third, I don’t know that there’s good evidence that there will be a direct tradeoff between movie spending and other forms of entertaining. Video game sales are outstripping movie tickets, but it’s not like movie ticket sales have declined in relation to the rise of video games: in fact, both industries have experienced a similar downturn in the recession. And certainly, video game creators have an interest in Hollywood surviving as a way to spin off games into movies that help extend and make more durable existing franchises. There may be new forms of entertainment in 50 years, but I’m not sure it’s going to entirely replace movies or television, both of which have proven to be durable art forms even as our ways of consuming them change, posing both distribution and storytelling challenges. I don’t doubt that we’ll get new and exciting forms of entertainment. But I don’t think we’ll have to kill Hollywood to get them.

No Robots from YungHan Chang on Vimeo.

Often, when we see robots in popular culture, they’re actually more powerful than we are. If the Cylons were a metaphor for, say, Irish immigrants to the United States, they’d be telling a story about workers rising up from the slums and engulfing us all in whiskey and potatoes. These metaphors tend to legitimate the fears of privileged class rather than debunking them. But a movie like No Robots has a different power differential. The shopkeeper is angry at a robot who is physically smaller than he is, who is annoying rather than intimidating. He commits an act of terrible violence against that much more vulnerable actor. And then he discovers that things he’s conditioned to want to protect and find adorable—kittens—are emotionally dependent on the robot, who has been stealing milk to feed them. It’s a narrative that questions the shopkeeper’s prejudices and assumptions, rather than suggesting he’s right to be angry and afraid of a new element in his environment.

(HT: io9)

It’s useful to look at how book and music pricing’s shaken out in recent years. It used to be that publishers set a price for books that retailers would pay, and the retailers would then determine what price they wanted to charge consumers based on that cost. In the e-publishing era, they’ve moved to something called the “agency model,” where publishers set prices for their titles and retailers like Amazon get 30 percent of that price. It’s a system where retailers have less power than they had previously, and even under both models, the publishers had significant control over basic pricing.

That system means that the publisher’s and retailers’ incentives are fairly closely tied together. Which isn’t entirely the case for the studios and the theater owners, the former of whom want to monetize a mix of movies across multiple platforms, the latter of whom want to get a steady number of people in proximity to candy counters and popcorn machines. You see a lot of friction between the parties, as with the scrapped plan to release Tower Heist both in theaters and via premium-priced Video on Demand, or with 3D pricing, which some filmmakers have said is too expensive and drive moviegoers away from theaters. The New York Times had a good piece this summer about the incentives that have driven studios and theaters apart on pricing:

Even some of the best-compensated players are beginning to wonder whether exhibitors and studios are pushing their luck with consumers….Historically, the big theater chains like Regal, AMC Entertainment, Cinemark Theatres and Carmike or their predecessors have been reluctant to raise ticket prices because their profit margins were higher on the sale of popcorn and other concessions than from tickets. Thus, they had an interest in raising the number of attendees, rather than maximizing film revenue that would be shared with studios. (The studios and exhibitors typically split the proceeds from each ticket sale, although the exhibitors alone set the price to consumers.)…More recently, though, theater chains turned to price increases, and especially to premium prices for 3-D and big-screen formats like Imax, for added cash that sometimes has been used to pay large dividends to shareholders or to pay down debt.

Cinemark Holdings, though generally more restrained than some of its peers when it comes to pricing, raised its quarterly dividend 17 percent, to 21 cents a share from 18 cents, an amount that nearly equaled its earnings in the first quarter. Meanwhile, Carmike, which operates many small-town theaters with relatively low ticket prices, has paid down a substantial $100 million in debt in just over three years.

Negotiating how variable ticket pricing would work would require fiendishly difficult movie-by-movie negotiations. Discounting a small independent movie might be in the interests of an individual filmmaker willing to accept small profits to get a movie in front of audiences, but it could also create the perception within a studio that one film was being used to undercut the performance of others. If the theaters started slashing prices on individual movies, one studio might feel it’s being targeted compared to other studios who are getting the revenue from regular ticket pricing. There’s no question that variable pricing would be in the interests of consumers. But the interests are complex and murky enough that it’s not clear that it would be in the interests of the studios or the theater owners — or of streaming providers. It’s worth remembering that the prices for movies you watch through Netflix or Amazon don’t vary either.

1) What are the best things I should read about the economics of Hollywood generally? About cost controls, auditing, etc. on film projects? Is it just Arthur De Vany’s Hollywood Economics, or should I be looking at other things?

2) What are the best things I should read about the economics of special effects, and the impact of globalization on special effects costs, wages, working conditions?

If enough good suggestions come in and folks are interested, I’d be open to doing a bit of a reading group. In the mean time, though, send me everything: books, magazine articles, scholarly journals, whatever.

I’m all for making fun of ridiculous beliefs, but I tend to believe that, when possible, you should try to find a way to do so that doesn’t result in you looking like a tremendous, elitist jerk. Reinforcement of your own moral superiority and self-satisfaction is not a particularly admirable motivation. It’s a lot dumber and more dangerous to believe that, say, Social Security is unconstitutional than to care about the outcome of a dopey contest that’s a long-time local tradition.

In the concisely titled study “The Role of Actors’ Race in White Audiences’ Selective Exposure to Movies,” Indiana University professor Andrew Weaver writes, “Movie producers are often reluctant to cast more than a few minority actors in otherwise race-neutral movies for fear that the white audience will largely avoid such films.” Weaver found that white audiences tended to be racially selective with regard to romantic movies, but not necessarily when it came to other genres. So, sorry, Hollywood. You can’t blame it on the ticket buyers. And as the bankability of comic book franchises begins to cool — did we really need four hero-in-tights movies this summer alone? — you have to wonder if studios will ever get hip to the possibilities of going after multi-cultural audiences.

I’d be extremely curious to see why racial preferences continue to exist in romantic stories. Is it that we’re still harboring anxieties about interracial relationships? That we think people of other races much have vastly different courting processes and preferences to our own such that we couldn’t possibly see ourselves in other people’s journeys towards happily ever after (the wild success of My Big Fat Greek Wedding would seem to give the lie to this, at least to a certain extent)? Whatever the reason, it’s fascinating that white audiences are entirely comfortable watching black and Latino people, say, use a lot of concentrated firepower to fight aliens, but draw the line at watching them date.

Ben Affleck: I need your help. I can’t tell you what it is. You can never ask me about it later. And we’re going to hurt some people.

Jeremy Renner: Whose car are we going to take?

Watch it:

According to the Washington Post, Rep. Allen West (R-FL) replied “I’m ready to drive the car.”

In the movie, the characters then put on hockey masks and bludgeon two men with sticks, then shoot one man in the leg.

In real life, Boehner has since decided to rewrite his plan and delayed a vote until “Thursday or Friday,” after failing to secure enough support for the current version.

Women

1) Happy ending
2) Sad/tear-jerker scene
3) Song and dance scene
4) Romantic comedy
5) Psychological thriller
6) Straight talking male/female partners
7) Musical
8) Animation
9) Tragedy
10) Disaster

Men

1) Car chase
2) Nude scene
3) Action sequence
4) Sex scene
5) Sci-fi/fantasy
6) Chase scene
7) Martial arts
8) Violent/gory scene
9) War
10) Interrogation

If I had detailed access to the data, I could probably pick it apart. But I don’t even think you have to do that to debunk the idea that these stated preferences mean you can’t make movies that men and women can both enjoy. Avatar, for example, has chase scenes, close-to-nude scenes, action sequences, implied sex scenes, sci-fi to to the max, war, AND a happy ending, tearjerker scenes, comedic elements in a romance, men and women who have pretty frank conversations, animation, tragedy, and disaster. Psychological thrillers often include many of the elements that are high on men’s lists. War movies are great vehicles for intense, tragic romances. Making multi-dimensional movies, and capturing multiple audiences at once, isn’t remotely as hard as this study, or Hollywood in general, makes it out.

It is coming out on DVD in August.  You can pre-order it here.  And you can enter (before June 30th) to win one of 100 DVDs that will be given away by Stonyfield Farm here.

Gary Hirshberg, President and CE-Yo of Stonyfield Farm, explains why they partnered with the film and promoted it on their lids:

Stonyfield Farm chose to partner with Carbon Nation and to appear in the film because a large part of our mission is to protect and restore the planet. We believe that every person can be a climate activist, and that being green can also mean being profitable.  We need to make changes now so that future generations can enjoy clean air, water and soil. This movie offers us hope that this is not only possible, but utterly achievable.

Can’t argue with that.

You can see the film trailer — which I’m not entirely thrilled with — here:

Yes, this is “a climate change solutions movie [that doesn't even care if you believe in climate change],” which I suppose is okay for marketing purposes.

True, the film doesn’t focus on global warming, but it does make clear that it is in fact happening and humans are the cause. I doubt many people who don’t accept climate science will go to a movie titled Carbon Nation, no matter how it is marketed.

What makes the movie worth seeing is the personality-driven stories, like the one-armed wind developer. The tone and pacing are quite breezy, so I’m confident you will both learn something and enjoy the movie.

I did get to see some early cuts of the movie and offered them a few suggestions. The movie is a success because of the vision of Director Peter Byck, and his decision to focus on winning stories.

For more information, go to the website, where you’ll see many other positive reviews.

In Richard and Florence Atwater’s 1938 children’s novel, on which the movie is nominally based, Mr. Potter is an impoverished but self-educated housepainter who is fascinated by the wider world he’ll never be able to visit, particularly by the exploits of the famous Admiral Drake. In Jim Carrey’s movie, Mr. Popper is a Wall Street dealmaker who has alienated himself from his family, and really needs a novel intervention, like a flock of penguins, to help him relax and reconnect with his kids. In the novel, caring for his expanding brood of penguins comes at substantial cost, and in one case, serious humiliation, to Mr. Popper and his family. In the movie, apparently, turning your luxury apartment into an open-air winter wonderland is proof that you’ve acquired a sense of whimsy and got your values back. In the novel, Mr. Popper eventually sets sail with Admiral Drake, getting the adventure he’s always wanted, but on the way to give up the penguins that meant so much to him, after which he’ll presumably return to painting houses and dreaming of far-off lands. I will be shocked if the movie ends in any way other than Carrey rediscovering himself as a family man and as a man of business, and some solution like a large donation to an aquarium keeps the penguins within visiting distance of his kids. That’s some of the worst of our pop culture in a 90-minute family movie: no working-class heroes, no compromises, no costs.

And a clip that rolled on Hannity a while back:

It looks pretty dull. The folks talking against blank backgrounds (as well as the disembodied waving finger) are straight out of bad, clip-show-assembled campaign ads. Palin had the advantage of surprise and freshness when she walked onto the national stage in 2008, but that’s gone now. Pieces like Josh Green’s meditation on what Palin might have been, had history and temperament proved different, can reframe known facts, but I’m not sure there are really new ones to reveal. If there was a genuinely new story to tell about Palin, this movie might be a smart, media-savvy way to launch her campaign. But since there isn’t, her presence either in or on the fringes of the campaign and the debate around it are just going to be the political and cultural equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Lots of your female heroines have wonderful father figures.

My dad was the one who got me started writing, and encouraged me to write. He shared a lot of his books with me when I was a kid and we were growing up. I still think my dad walks on water. My interest in military history is due to him, my interest in the American past is due to him. He was just very influential in my life…Especially if you’re going to have a daughter who is going to push her way forward, there’s nothing more important than a father.

That last sentence in particular crystallized some things I’ve been mulling for a while about a new book by Dr. Peggy Drexler, Our Fathers, Ourselves. The book isn’t, as Drexler puts it, “a process based on impersonal science…using statistical analyses to extract facts and figures and draw conclusions based on numbers.” Instead, Drexler presents the patterns she saw in interviews with 75 highly successful women about their relationships with their fathers, setting the table for a conversation about a dynamic that’s hugely ignored in a world that focuses much more on the impact fathers have on their sons.

What struck me about Drexler’s book is that way the fathers in it made it safe for their daughters to take risks by treating conflict and disagreement as if they were natural rather than a sign of failure. One woman she interviewed said “As a kid, I remember when we would play games—Monopoly or anything like that—he would never let us win, my brother or me. He always played the best he could…I remember beating my dad at checkers for the first time at seven years old and I was very satisfied with that because I knew I’d won it fair and square.” Another broke with her father’s religious traditions: “I’m sure it upset my dad. It was really his family that was more religious. But I felt like he let me make that choice for myself and to this day, I still drive [on the Sabbath].” As a result, these daughters have been able to do what Pierce said was important, push their way forward without fear of hurting someone. Their relationships aren’t brittle.

And as a result of that outward approach, Drexler’s interviews suggest that these women who have strong relationships with their fathers are also able to process their mixed emotions about those interactions fairly well. They could grow to see their fathers more clearly but not have good memories tainted by the flaws that emerged, or they could hope that they would marry men who would parent differently without feeling that they had to reject their fathers and the models they set completely. Daughters may, in some cases, be more aware of potential difficulties: “The ambivalence didn’t originate with the fathers as much as with the daughters, whose elevated financial status catapulted them to new heights of emotional and familial complexity. It also seemed that the higher a daughter lept, the greater complexity she encountered.” But the women Drexler talked to also don’t seem to have held themselves back from achieving: they can confront those emotions and manage them rather than back away for fear of triggering them.

And how is this useful in a fictional context? First, all the things Drexler’s describing make for great characters: breaking boundaries, working through complex emotions, doing things you’re afraid of or that cause conflict. Second, what’s interesting about the boom in Daddy’s Deadly Little Girl movies—we’ve already got Kick-Ass and Hanna, and a Matt Damon project about a father-daughter crime spree is on the way—is part of the trend is that fathers encourage daughters to break boundaries, but in ways that are essentially deviant. I don’t know if that’s a gendered trend, as if having a father mentor a daughter is inherently weird and likely to cause trouble, or just a specific trend that will either flicker or give rise to a more nuanced wave of father-daughter movies. Either way, I’m glad we’ve got Big Daddy and Hit-Girl’s relationship on screen.

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy Grietje Haitsma.

The experience of faeries in the human world is an interesting reversal of the challenges faced by human immigrants in the U.S., particularly those who don’t come here through legal means: faeries are much more powerful than your standard-issue human of any nationality, giving them significant advantages in conflicts with authority, and they threaten to take people back over the border with them rather than worrying that they’ll be deported. And of course, the prospect of discovering you’re a changeling is a useful metaphor for grappling with all kinds of difference, whether sexual orientation, gender identity, Asperger syndrome (Michael Chabon’s Summerland does a nice job with this in particular), or broader cultural and political alienation from wherever you’re stuck.

I’d love to see someone do some work, whether it’s adaptive or original, along those lines. If people are looking for works to adapt, they might consider the Borderlands series, which I’ve always found interesting for reasons of process as well as content. The series is written collaboratively by a bunch of different authors, usually in short story collections, and they deal with what it would be like if you had a rough-and-tumble, Old-West-but-steampunk-and-magic city at the dividing line between the human and faery realms. The answer, apparently, is that you get fantastic bookstores and pizza, as well as a lot of class conflict. I’m especially fond of Will Shetterly’s two novels, Elsewhere and Nevernever, which deal beautifully with everything from suicide, to disability, to drug addiction, to the challenges of losing your virginity after a vengeful faerie turns you into a werewolf (turns out you get to sing in a band called Sargent Furry and His Howling Commandos, though, so there are compensations).

I’m worried, though, that this new trend (as well as the mini-boom in angels and fallen angels stories) will follow the path of much of the vampire culture of recent years: all surface, no substance. It’s one of my biggest pet peeves, the fact that given the opportunity to work with cool concepts, that people will forfeit the opportunity and get entranced by shiny fangs and glittery wings.

And it looks like Beautiful Boy will be focused more on the aftermath of the shooting and how the killer’s families come to terms both with what he’s done and with their memories of him:

While I think both of these movies may be psychologically useful for audiences, but I’m not sure what their use is—or really any attempt to understand why someone does something like this—in trying to make sure that spree killings happen with less frequency. There are obvious and valuable policy lessons we can take away from these shootings, whether they happen in an Arizona parking lot or rural Virginia campus, about the availability of automatic weapons and ammunition and about how hard it is to get quality and sustained mental health care at a reasonable cost. But we’re not ever going to unlock a motivational key that will keep anyone from ever wanting to commit murder on this scale again.

District 9 is a model of uneasy coexistence.

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.