The movie Battleship has a neat and simple premise: if aliens find us, it’ll be like the conquest of the New World, except we’re the natives.
So, when American earthlings announce our address in the universe with a big honking message – helpfully visualized as a beam of light no less – an advance party of aliens come barreling through the cosmos with intent to colonize.
Now there’s a framework just sturdy enough to support all the fighting and what-not, but it makes me think too. What if instead of just one race coming to get us, what if there’s also another race – or even a different faction of the same race – that comes to frustrate the first race’s mission, thereby unintentionally saving us.
Wow. Then the earth would be a ringside seat to some massively telegenic space battle scenes. Earthling armies would all be on standby, with soldiers just craning their eyes skyward. Obviously, with so much alien hardware in the atmosphere, our satellites would have been fried, so all we can really do is eyeball.
Then, as the earth armies are watching a particularly grand exchange of photon torpedoes or something, a small light detaches from the main battle and lands. LANDS!
All our high muckity-mucks rush over and watch in amazement as the hatch opens and reveals an ALIEN! With a universal translator!
“Forgive us our trespasses,” he croaks.
“We tried to stop our brothers from coming to colonize you, but as you can see, we are being overmatched. We need your help!”
We’re doubtful at first, of course, and we refuse to decide. So the alien offers to be our prisoner as a sign of good faith. He even throws in his space junk as a kind of collateral. But before he goes into the Fort Knox vault, he issues a dire warning.
“We have three of your days left. Our brothers have triggered a planet killer. It takes three days to warm up, and at the end of that time, well, I’ll prolly live a little longer than you since I’m in this secure bunker and all.”
Whatta troll!
But we buy it and promise the alien full cooperation.
“Great! Take me back to my ship!”
After he convinces his sky-buddies that the earthlings are onboard, thousands and thousands of friendly-alien space junks [yeah, junk as in the ship, not junk as in rubbish which has no -s form] land and pretty soon, they’ve plugged in to the entire internet. “This is important,” the alien says, “because we have to coordinate the launch of all your nukes down to the nano-second and your pitiful computers just aren’t good enough. IN fact,” the alien hastens to add, “even your fiber optic cables are so XT. Tell you what. We’ll replace your cable networks with our bad-ass tech as soon as we’re done here.”
Techies and IT experts all applaud and wet their pants in excitement.
Then, when all the interconnections have been made, the fireworks in the sky – a regular feature for days – suddenly ends.
People blink up at the sky owlishly and wonder, is it over? We thought they were gonna launch our nukes.
No answers are forthcoming.
Instead, the sky suddenly darkens as thousands of space junks gently float back to earth. When finally, the biggest ship lands in Central Park in New York, the hatch opens and reveals the friendly alien being chummy with the supposedly evil alien.
A mic rises up from out of nowhere and the friendly alien booms!
REJOICE! WE HAVE SIGNED A PEACE TREATY WITH OUR BROTHERS AND THEY HAVE AGREED TO LEAVE YOUR PLANET. TO ME! BWAHAHAHAHA.
At that precise moment, somewhere in the Philippines, Gregorio Zaide turns over in his grave, muttering something incoherent about the Spanish-American war.
And then I wake up. The movie’s over and I missed seeing Brooklyn Decker’s … acting.