UFO (2018)

directed by Ryan Eslinger
USA
88 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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I watched this mainly for Gillian Anderson, who wears the worst wig I've ever seen in my life, and assumed that everything about it that wasn't her would be terrible. The other reason why it appealed to me is because it has an earnestness that I love, and because it deals with a subject that's close to my heart: the discovery of solid evidence that aliens are communicating with us. I don't immediately love every film about this concept, because some are badawful, but UFO does it in the way that appeals to me most: with open-minded curiosity and a good amount of scientific rigor (some of which might have been bunk, but it uses theories that are legit, at least). Movies like this touch a part of my childhood, the part that hung out in the closet under the stairs pretending I was in a spaceship talking to aliens.

One common complaint I'm seeing in reviews is that it's too "talky", but that was the best part about it for me. This isn't the kind of film where a bunch of inept teens see a UFO, chase after it with substandard camera equipment, and get themselves abducted. The main character of this film goes about pursuing what he's fairly certain is aliens with caution and occasional outside assistance, and even though he's, like, unrealistically in-the-know about every single subject on Earth, he's likable. Generally a lot of movies where the crux of the plot depends on one singular guy who just ~Knows~ are annoying, but something about this particular Guy Who ~Knows~ wasn't getting on my nerves. It's nice that most of the people around him are at least somewhat willing to play along, too. Friends in denial are another irritatingly common trope of sci-fi movies.

I think I was expecting this to be a horror movie, and that fact played into why I was so pleasantly surprised by it. There's as much motivation behind the aliens in this film as there was behind the WOW! Signal- precisely none, simply (if you want to believe the WOW! Signal was aliens) a reach-out in the form of a bunch of code that it takes a lot of people with Smarts™ to decode.

The final line of this- "We're not alone"- is everything I want out of an alien movie. I don't want guns and lasers, I don't want beautiful women getting bodysnatched, at the end of the day I just want a realistic exchange; the aliens sending us math to say "hey you guys smart enough to get this?" Leave motive to the other films, leave intent for later. The simple fact that we're not alone in the universe is the point of this film, and the details of what the aliens look like or what they want is left aside in favor of spotlighting the massive implications of that one fact.