Lame, Ridiculous Alien Movies that Really Aren't so Lame and Ridiculous Through a Post-structuralism Lens

Last night I went to see the Star wars premiere. As I don’t want to post any spoilers, I have decided to analyze the previews, because they kind of got on my nerves. There were twenty five minutes of previews (trust me, I counted), and I know at least three of the films that were previewed were about aliens coming to take over the earth. I have never quite understood why so many films of this genre exist. I mean, why make a movie about beings from another planet coming to destroy the earth, when humans are already destroying the earth right now? Wall-e was a very successful movie, there could definitely stand to be more movies like that. But I digress.

I was thinking about why there could possibly be so many alien films, and I thought that maybe they could be a used as in interpretation for post-structuralism. In the beginning of the semester, we read an essay called “Identity and Difference” by Martin Heidegger. In his essay, if you didn’t remember, he talked about Existence, and how people feel about their own own sense of self, which comes from thinking of Being and Existence separately.

Now going back to the previews, I feel that these films about an otherworldly threat that challenge one’s difference of Being and Existence, make people subconsciously think about these theories questions in the actual world. This one specific film preview stuck out to me, and it was called Wave 5. In the preview you learn all  about the aliens invading the earth and what happens in the different ‘waves’. In the fourth wave, the aliens start to inhabit the remaining human beings on Earth, and no one can tell whether a person is a real human being or not. So this film really specifically goes along with the poststructuralist identity crises. Heidegger said “the Being of Existence  is authenticating reason”. In the alien movie, the humans have to establish the Being of Existence in order to be validated as actual humans, and this definition of being and how it differentiates against Existence is how people are able to defeat the aliens (probably, as I haven’t actually seen any of these alien movies). It is also important to mention that Heidegger mentions that “difference is reduced to a distinction, to a product of human intelligence”, and of course we all know that the human intelligence/idea is what makes humans so much better than the aliens, or robots, or whatever is challenging their existence, as well as Existence (with the capital E).

So what is my overall point, exactly? Well, I would like to believe that all of these ridiculous alien movies are really just an expression of human identity. Which of course, is totally possible when you look at them through a poststructuralist lens. These alien movies become so popular, because subconsciously, people really want to  differentiate their sense of Being and Existence, which makes them able to validate themselves because of their great human intelligence. I think that this new post structuralist outlook made me see some credibility in the common alien films.