When Aliens Attack

The title is what initially caught my eye. So I sat down to watch a "When Aliens Attack". Personally I try not to grade movies on bad CGI so I won't do that here either. However I didn't care for them running an endless loop or using stock footage of riots. I would have preferred they just interviewed the experts. I don't care for the "edutainment" value of their production.

Now on to the "experts" they interviewed. David Bartell seems to gravitate to the documentaries, he appears as a expert in several off the wall "what if" scenarios. As far as I know, he is a science-fiction writer and not an actual scientist or psychologist. The documentary has a serious lack of experts in any field of research. I would like to have heard from political sciences, astronomers, biologists, and sociologists. They make it sound like Dr. Stephen Hawking is part of the panel. Instead they quote one line from him and move on.

Nothing is expressed about plans other countries outside the US and UK might have. No scenarios are given for China, Korea, Japan, Egypt, etc.. Instead it plays out as another bad sci-fi movie where it is up to the US to save the day. And they don't even express a no win scenario. Apparently we can defeat anything given the ambition.

For the entire run time the viewer is told exactly how it would happen but is not told why it would have to happen this way. Survivalists are interviewed and give their opinions about food, water, etc. but this advice can be found in most boy scout manuals. They insist that resistance cells would reemerge and come up with terror attacks against the aliens.

The probability of this is extremely low, but I am not expressing any opinion on the topic matter. This is just bad production value. It contains no information any person with common wouldn't already know. Bad advice and ridiculous plans are given throughout this film. I would rather pop in any old 60's sci-fi movie over this any day of the week and you might learn more.

This mockumentary, if taken for what it is, is amusing and it does give some good and practical real world advice, mostly being prepared for a disaster and having a plan to survive. They also advice evacuating the cities through the sewers, and avoiding roads and bridges in such a situation. It is highly speculative, but when it comes to a hypothetical alien invasion, speculation is all anyone can ever have. The battle itself, and the human strategies, it looks towards nature and war for tactics that may work (or did work in this case). Some of it, such as humans living in small bands in forests, deserts, and caves and resorting to guerrilla tactics, is probably a very likely scenario should such a thing happen. But nevertheless the premises can only be speculative as we simply cannot know what the aliens would be like, exactly why they or here, or how they would behave. There are aliens, we are humans, and it could have done more to stress that this very fundamental difference makes even "every war game scenario imaginable" inadequate. If you want to watch something to learn, this is not a good pick. But if you want to be entertained in a manner where science and history mingle with the imagination, similar to The Last Dragon, it's an interesting watch.