Here’s how Barry Strugatz, writer and director of From Other
Worlds, describes the genesis of that alleged comedy in the
“Director’s Note” that comes with the film’s press materials:
“There is a whole UFO contact subculture that exists. There are
scores of gatherings around the country where alleged contactees
meet in support groups. What if one person in one of these groups
actually had a real experience?”
Answer: it wouldn’t be a comedy anymore.
For the comic potential of the “UFO contact subculture” depends
on its nuttiness. If there were “a real experience” of aliens, the
nuts would have in some degree to cease being nuts — and,
therefore, to cease being funny.
Although the press materials go on to cite as influences
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Cat People
and Rosemary’s Baby, I suspect Mr. Strugatz was really
thinking of Dean Parisot’s Galaxy Quest (1999). There, a
race of aliens at war with an evil, inter-galactic warlord come to
earth to ask for help from the cast of a Star Trek-like TV
show that they think is real. But Galaxy Quest was about
heroism and pretense — and how the pretense of heroism can lead to
the real thing. The film’s lightness of touch was its saving grace
and was entirely owing to this anchor in the real world. In other
words, it didn’t matter if the aliens were aliens or just any
foreigners who didn’t understand what American TV culture was
about. The point was that, out of their naivete, they took
something seriously that the TV show didn’t — and so made it
serious again.
There’s nothing like that in From Other Worlds. The
movie depends on the aliens being aliens — though there is only
one of them on screen and he provides the opposite of an exciting
encounter with extra-terrestrial life-forms, since he adopts the
form — naturally, he has shape-shifting powers — of TV and movie
aliens so that we media-drugged earthlings will recognize him as
what he claims to be. What an imaginative cop-out! Moreover, not
only does the appearance of this Leonard Nimoy wannabe give a
sudden quasi-legitimacy to the cranks and nut-jobs who had been
believing in him or someone like him before there was any reason
for them to believe, but it leaves the movie with nowhere to go but
into a dull literalism.
Perhaps realizing that the contact group has so quickly
exhausted its comic potential, Mr. Strugatz pretty much lets it
fall by the wayside and concentrates instead on the feeble quest
story involving his two main characters, bored housewife Joanne
Schwartzbaum (Cara Buono) and an immigrant cab driver from the
Ivory Coast called Abraham (Isaach De Bankole). The McGuffin here
is the recently discovered and supposedly only surviving scroll
from the famous library at Alexandria, Egypt, burnt with all its
contents in AD 640. The scroll is supposed to be an alien artefact
and is now in the possession of the Brooklyn Museum. When
deciphered, the alien (Joel de la Fuente) informs them, its
contents will “unlock the secrets of nature” and so create a
destructive force that will “make the Dark Ages look like
DisneyWorld.”
Sure it will! So, of course, Joanne and Abraham’s mission is to
steal the scroll from the museum and substitute for it one that has
“corrected our [that is, the aliens’] great error.” Instead of
devastating us, the new information “will take the whole human race
to the next evolutionary level.” Yeah, I’m afraid they really mean
that too. Such adolescent portentousness out-Star-Treks Star
Trek. It’s one thing to make fun of cheesy science fiction.
It’s quite another to become cheesy science fiction.
So, you see, this handsome couple are really out to (yawn) save
the planet. And the lameness of the plot is increased rather than
diminished by sub-plots of ever more irritating irrelevancy having
to do with keeping Joanne’s husband (David Lansbury) from finding
out what they are doing and fending off an art thief posing as a
federal agent (Robert Peters). Up until the time when, two-thirds
of the way into the picture, the dubious alien appears, nothing
requires us to believe in real aliens or a real mission. But from
that point on, any chance for seriousness or comedy goes whooshing
out of it like air out of a balloon.
Barry Strugatz must have been relying for that all-important
lifeline to reality on the now-familiar story of female frustration
with domesticity summed up Joanne’s telling her shrink that
“there’s something missing” in her life and she feels she’s “just
going through the motions.” She’s “feeling lonely, unconnected,
like I don’t belong there…like life is a cruel hoax.” This, by
the way, gives rise to the one sort-of funny line of the movie when
the shrink prescribes some pills and says: “Don’t worry. Soon you
will be happy. Or at least minimally functional.” Of course, what
gets her out of her depression is not the pills but the excitement
of the mission to save the human race with the new man in her life.
Alas, real women who feel that “there’s something missing” are
unlikely to feel much comforted by the hope of being contacted by
aliens at all, let alone aliens like this wimpy specimen.
