Boring has long been part of the territory when it comes to imagining our first contact with aliens. Apart from Richard Dreyfuss moulding mashed potato, Close Encounters of the Third Kind is really dull. There isn’t a black hole big enough to consume all the tedium produced by Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner in Arrival. The disappointing truth about aliens is that hardly any of them, perhaps none, are as cute as ET.
Nic Stacey’s film First Contact: An Alien Encounter (BBC Two) honours this sci-fi sub-genre by being quite dull. Although it is billed as a dramatisation about what it would be like for us to encounter extraterrestrials, all we get is fuzzy mocked-up footage of space debris and a radio signal that probably isn’t Test Match Special but a cryptic message sent from a planet several hundred light years away. In thinly dramatised sequences, news anchors wax excitable and small boys interviewed in the street get very animated about the possibility that little green gender-indeterminate entities are coming.
An unacceptably high proportion of this feature-length show consists not of dramatised scenes but of white noise and sub-Koyaanisqatsi imagery. David Shukman, a former BBC science correspondent, gamely produces fictional reports on what, if anything, it all means. Talking heads, all disappointingly humanoid, witter about gravitation and radio frequencies. I wanted different talking heads, The Simpsons’ perma-drooling one-eyed extraterrestrials Kang and Kodos ideally, telling us Rishi Sunak has been vaporised and they are our new overlords.
Instead, we get a very sensible ex-Nasa scientist who doubts that humans have the right stuff to communicate with aliens. Fair enough, but way to destroy the programme’s premise, Poindexter. We can hardly communicate with other Earth-based life forms, he adds, so what chances have we got with beings from outer space? Cephalopods think with their limbs, he argues, which is just one reason wrestling an octopus is a mug’s game and beating a squid at underwater chess is beyond even the skill set of Anya Taylor-Joy.
First Contact draws on three real-life incidents for its dramatic material. In 1977, the superbly named Big Ear radio telescope picked up the so-called “wow signal”, which appeared to come from extraterrestrial life in the constellation Sagittarius. In 2009, the space telescope Kepler was launched to find Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, so-called Goldilocks planets where life as we know it is possible.
Finally, in 2017, an object was spotted flying past the Sun. Named ‘Oumuamua, it was up to 1,000 metres long, and was found to be accelerating due to non-gravitational forces. Could it be a spacecraft? The favoured explanation now is that it was a hunk of exoplanet, but let’s not spoil the story.
From these ingredients, Stacey makes a cosmic soup of a programme. He imagines that Nasa’s new James Webb space telescope produces evidence that a radio communication just like the “wow signal” in 1977 originated from an exoplanet of a binary star system a few hundred light years from Earth. Then astronomers witness a mysterious object, like a huge space ship, or Battlestar Galactica’s wing mirror after a space prang, falling in a weird trajectory across the sun.
Faced with this apparent evidence of alien life, humanity, in Stacey’s drama, panics. An anthropologist confirms that this is what would happen – after all, Covid led to shortages of pasta and toilet paper, so a suspected alien attack would surely make humanity go even more wild. Stacey imagines that US gun sales double and paranoid memes from bleating Earthlings clog social media. “If the aliens are anything like us,” tweets someone in the drama insightfully, “they are certainly not coming in peace.”
If only he had had a bigger budget, Stacey could have hired Will Smith to reprise his Independence Day performance as a fighter pilot kicking alien ass, or pay for Suella Braverman to do a walk-on announcing Home Office plans to send the alien invaders not to Rwanda, but to another galaxy far, far away.
Instead, up pops Shukman with a dismal analysis. The source of the signal is a planet that, like Icarus, flew too close to its sun and was destroyed. Ziggy Stardust was wrong: there is no starman waiting in the sky. Instead, what remains of the alien civilisation is a radio signal. It crossed space-time to reach us many years after those who sent it had become stardust and, like some cosmic Rosetta Stone, is doomed to be indecipherable for millennia.
The chilling possibility that First Contact leaves us with then is that, like Liz Truss’s cabinet, outer space today may be devoid of intelligent life. Of course all this is highly speculative. Maybe we are all alone. Maybe aliens are among us but we are too thick to realise it. When it comes to alien life, the only certainty is that those of you who learned Klingon were wasting your time.
