For some reason, aliens are still invading Steven Spielberg’s Planet Earth.
Throughout his career, America’s foremost filmmaker has allowed his native soil to be conquered — and reconquered — so many times that you’d think word would’ve gotten out across deep space that it’s not worth the trip.
But yet they keep coming.
This Sunday, the latest horde of marauding spacemen touches down in “Falling Skies,” an eight-part series executive-produced by Spielberg for TNT. Not all aliens have been equal in the Spielberg canon, however. His visitors have ranged from the cuddly (“ET,” “Gremlins”) to the serene (“Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Indiana Jones”), and from the robotic (“Transformers”) to the comical (“Men in Black”) to the slithering (“War of the Worlds”).
The planet devourers in “Falling Skies” fall into that last category. They’re a race of giant spiders hell-bent on ravaging the Earth — but they don’t count on the courage of a ragtag band of fighters led by Tom Mason (Noah Wyle) who call themselves “The Resistance.”
One or two alien invasions in a filmmaker’s work is understandable; eight (or so) and we wonder if the man has something of a complex. So, the question arises: what is it with Spielberg and little green men?
Singular as it seems, Spielberg’s alien fetish casts light on the confusion of his generation — the conflicts rumbling within the mind of the baby boomer.
Since their childhoods spent watching B-movie serials in the 1950s, boomers have been fascinated by the heroic archetypes of their elders — while at the same time deeply uncomfortable with the good versus evil roles these icons fulfill.
Spielberg and his peers forever want to create heroes — but heroes require villains, and villainy is not a politically correct label to slap on anyone in this day and age.
So, if you can’t have your heroes stand tall against say, Al Qaeda, or the Soviet Union — to name two of America’s more recent foes — a filmmaker must cast a much wider net.
Whether he’s working in drama or adventure, Spielberg’s baddies have one thing in common — they’ve never been people you’re likely to bump into on your average American street, or see on your average American news program.
Since the 1970s, Spielberg’s heroes have fought sharks (“Jaws”), dinosaurs (“Jurassic Park”), pirates (“Hook”), Nazis (“Indiana Jones,” “Schindler’s List,” “Saving Private Ryan”), the Japanese (“1941,” a comedy, and “Empire of the Sun”) and slave traders (“Amistad”). Given this list, space aliens fit right in as distant, totally uncontroversial faces of evil.
The only contemporary villain in the Spielberg collection is so cartoonish he might as well be a space alien: that stock character left over from ’70s disaster films — the heartless capitalist so obsessed with profits and/or following rules he’s forgotten about people, scolding in the face of all evidence, “You yell shark, and we’ve got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July” (a line from “Jaws”).
Throughout Spielberg’s films, the greatest terror is that of the unleashed mob. In “AI” and “War of the Worlds,” he paints the most horrifying scenes of masses running wild.
For Spielberg, the modern world is a place of confusion and anxiety forever simmering just beneath the surface.
For clarity, for good and evil, it is all we humans can do to look not to ourselves, but to the stars.
Richard Rushfield is the author of “American Idol: The Untold Story.”