Notes from the sketch book

  It's the penultimate part of the Among Us series and if we left things at the foot of Devils Tower, you’d be forgiven for thinking humanity’s best option was to pack a bag, ditch the kids and hitch a ride off the planet. In Close Encounters Roy Nearly didn't look back, he didn't give his wife or children a second thought, he gladly embraced the invitation to walk on board the alien spaceship. That was in 1977, Spielberg was in his 30s and single ambitious director with no children and was convinced the guilt free escape was the ultimate adventure. A...

Four movies in, and we’ve spent hours locked in the dark staring down our absolute ugliest instincts. Its time for a ray of light, but even this series' most hopeful moments carry a sharp, bitter edge. First we got the creeping identity theft of the pod people. Don Siegel gave us the fifties version in sleepy Santa Mira, where your uncle still looked like your uncle right up until he handed you over to the state. Twenty-two years later, Philip Kaufman dragged that exact same nightmare into post-hippie San Francisco, trading small-town paranoia for the cold alienation of the late...

Alien invasion films have never really been about what is out in the stars – as we have discussed, they are a mirror for whatever is keeping us awake at night. Back in 1951, while most sci-fi films treated space invaders as thinly veiled stand-ins for Cold War enemies, Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still pulled off a brilliant bait-and-switch: it made humanity the real monster. It also pioneered the shift from external monsters to examine us as humans. Hiroshima and Nagasaki changed the ground rules of survival almost overnight. For the first time, we had tapped into...

This six-part retrospective I have been working on boils down to one wild idea: the way filmshandled alien invasions between 1951 and 1988 is basically a measure of American culturalanxiety. We are not just laughing at guys in cheap rubber suits or pie-tin flying saucers. Weare tracking a very real, very distinct brand of paranoia. Watching these older films today hits differently—there is a deeply unsettling mirror reflectinghow we react to the chaos of our own modern world. If there is one big takeaway from thisseries so far, it is how the whole 'alien among us' setup built an inescapable...

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey stands as the most exhilarating, terrifyingly scaled, and emotionally devastating American blockbuster I've seen in a decade. Sitting in the theater, the kinetic shock is palpable, this time that's not just his usual ear bleeding volume control. It feels as though Western mythology has been dragged from academia and thrown directly into the confusing, bloody reality of modern psychological trauma.  I actually had to triple-check the runtime before buying my ticket, as it takes up a good portion of your day. But once it starts, you realise you don't just watch this nearly three-hour colossus, it...