Extraterrestrial (Extraterrestre for the linguistically pedantic among you) is a new film by Nacho Vigalondo, director of Timecrimes, The Incredible Suit's best film that was made in 2007 but not released in the UK till 2009. I'm quite excited about it.
Timecrimes (Los CronocrÃmenes for the etc etc) was a cracking time-travel-mystery-thriller carnival of bonkers that proved what could be done with a great idea but not much money, so when Vigalondo announced his next film would be about an alien invasion, literally THE ENTIRE WORLD waited with bated breath to see what would happen.
And what's happened so far is two posters which appear to be marketing two completely different films. The found-footage / fake documentary version:
...and the sci-fi rom-com version:
I'm not sure which of those two versions I'm more excited about, although the Space Invaders poster is a genius visual summation of the synopsis - boy meets girl, falls in love, aliens invade.
Here are Vigalondo's own thoughts on the film, as detailed in his blog and translated by one of those reliable internet translatobots:
And who am I to argue with that?
Meanwhile, here's Vigalondo's 2003 short 7.35 In The Morning (it doesn't matter what its Spanish title is, stop going on about it), which is suitably daft and is as good a way as any to spend eight minutes of your life.
Now I’m not one of those people who says, “If I had a time machine I’d go back and do blah blah blah”. Having said that, if I had a time machine I’d go back and nail Shia LaBeouf’s doors and windows shut on the day he was meant to audition for Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, but that’s neither here nor there.
The thing about time travel is it’s a goldmine for telling great stories, as proven by the fact that even a load of slushy old chickery flickery like The Time Traveller’s Wife is surprisingly unterrible because Eric Bana’s lurches through time give it a cerebellum-exercising twist. In fact the films that focus on the effects and possibilities arising from time travel, rather than an FX-heavy display of how it happens, tend to be the better stories.
For, as they say, example: The Time Machine isn’t about time travel, it’s about where we’re going as a species. Back To The Future isn’t really about time travel, it’s about the unbridled horror of meeting your Mum as a teenager and having her drool all over you like a rabid mastiff. And The Terminator just uses time travel to kick start a relentless game of cat and mouse between an incomprehensible robot and a massive hairdo with a small woman underneath.
What’s great about these films is their inherent re-watchability. You simply have to see them more than once because the knowledge of how it all fits together only enhances an already mind-squootling experience. Now there are loads of cracking time travel movies that not enough people have seen, and it’s my duty and my honour to make you aware of a couple of them.
Just about the lowest-budget time travel movie ever (it cost $7,000), but it doesn’t matter because all the genius is in the story. Two mates build a time machine, try and use it to make a fast buck, but double-reverse-counter-cross each other all over the place until nobody knows where they live or what their name is. The mechanics of their time travelling are so labyrinthine that to explain it would be like turning your brain into spaghetti and noodles and then trying to work out which is which.
Much less boggling than Primer; it will only turn your brain into spaghetti. One man has the most bonkers afternoon of his life when he spots a naked woman in the woods behind his house and - obviously - goes to investigate, a course of action which will leave him bloody, battered, and with various duplicates of himself mucking about in the space-time continuum causing all sorts of monkey business. One of The Incredible Suit’s best films of 2009.
And so, my duty done, I’m off to Hollywood in my DeLorean with a hammer, some nails and a map of the stars’ homes.
