ideas
movie dream
Movie Dreams - Jason Bateman, space alien
I had this elaborate movie-dream (I dream movie scripts all the time), where people are at an outdoor concert and they see the sky light up with what looks like dozens and dozens of sonic booms high in the atmosphere. They are marveling at all this, when a space ship (kinda Millenium Falcon-ish looking, but smaller) lands under a bridge nearby. When they show up, the ship has turned into an 80's suburban. The father, played by Jason Bateman, gets out and explains they are from another planet and addresses the crowd saying, "But what if the term 'aliens' and 'spaceship' were removed from the language, and we just had a family of refugees who need a safe home?"
He has a wife and two children--a son of about 6 and a daughter of 13. Turns out they got to choose what form they wanted within reason. The father chose Jason Bateman from television (room for a "Jason Bateman playing himself meets his alien doppleganger later in the series). One witness quips that if they all choose Jason Bateman as their human form that would be fiiiine with her. The son really is 6, but the daughter is 16 and a cheerleader and gymnast back home. She chose to be younger so she could have more years to get better competitively (this not only tells us a lot about her character right from the pilot episode, but opens up a story-line later about who is alien and not--like having to prove you are not on steroids--and how that effects competitive playing rules. Will aliens even be allowed to join?).
So we learn that the race of people from the other planet are not so much more evolved or peaceful than us and just rallied together to visit the stars. It was an act of desperation as their planet was dying that they pulled together just in time to save a lucky few hundred thousand of their people to escape. There are still wars between cultures in their world, which didn't stop just because they came to Earth. But it is not easy to see who is who culturally any more, because not only was that not the root of their bigotry, but they all chose new appearances--white could be Hispanic, Asian could be Black, no one necessarily looks the same so one can't just draw stark lines like "white, black, Latino, Asian" and be unapologetically bigoted. But somehow THEY can tell which is which (smell, like phermones? something subtle in the eyes? don't know...).
Their continued issues of in-fighting become a real issue later, with Earth-dwellers completely confounded as to how they can be so bigoted against someone who seems to look and act JUST like them (which opens up storylines of race discrimination and how ridiculous it is to be bigoted, especially just based on pre-conceived notions when seeing someone's skin color or appearance). Perhaps some stories involving the refugees creating their own camps in which they bring their cultural families together (like an apartment building on Earth where everyone is Russian, because they wanted to live near other Russians), and the twist is that they are all different cultures physically (in an Earth sense), but they know they are all the same inside (see what I did there? Kind of reverse racism?)
And of course the usual issues of where to put all these new members of Earth society, when our resources are already stretched. Their technology and science being integrated with ours. Their comedic reactions to some of our seemingly primitive ways. Politicians/political concerns about governance/laws with these new people. Integrating socially... you get the idea.
And then I woke up.
He has a wife and two children--a son of about 6 and a daughter of 13. Turns out they got to choose what form they wanted within reason. The father chose Jason Bateman from television (room for a "Jason Bateman playing himself meets his alien doppleganger later in the series). One witness quips that if they all choose Jason Bateman as their human form that would be fiiiine with her. The son really is 6, but the daughter is 16 and a cheerleader and gymnast back home. She chose to be younger so she could have more years to get better competitively (this not only tells us a lot about her character right from the pilot episode, but opens up a story-line later about who is alien and not--like having to prove you are not on steroids--and how that effects competitive playing rules. Will aliens even be allowed to join?).
So we learn that the race of people from the other planet are not so much more evolved or peaceful than us and just rallied together to visit the stars. It was an act of desperation as their planet was dying that they pulled together just in time to save a lucky few hundred thousand of their people to escape. There are still wars between cultures in their world, which didn't stop just because they came to Earth. But it is not easy to see who is who culturally any more, because not only was that not the root of their bigotry, but they all chose new appearances--white could be Hispanic, Asian could be Black, no one necessarily looks the same so one can't just draw stark lines like "white, black, Latino, Asian" and be unapologetically bigoted. But somehow THEY can tell which is which (smell, like phermones? something subtle in the eyes? don't know...).
Their continued issues of in-fighting become a real issue later, with Earth-dwellers completely confounded as to how they can be so bigoted against someone who seems to look and act JUST like them (which opens up storylines of race discrimination and how ridiculous it is to be bigoted, especially just based on pre-conceived notions when seeing someone's skin color or appearance). Perhaps some stories involving the refugees creating their own camps in which they bring their cultural families together (like an apartment building on Earth where everyone is Russian, because they wanted to live near other Russians), and the twist is that they are all different cultures physically (in an Earth sense), but they know they are all the same inside (see what I did there? Kind of reverse racism?)
And of course the usual issues of where to put all these new members of Earth society, when our resources are already stretched. Their technology and science being integrated with ours. Their comedic reactions to some of our seemingly primitive ways. Politicians/political concerns about governance/laws with these new people. Integrating socially... you get the idea.
And then I woke up.
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