After watching the billionth-and-a-half movie about aliens, I've started to notice a sort of weird evolution in terms of how aliens in movies are represented. What do I mean? Look back at the aliens in Independence Day, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and (if you want to go back really far) the book of War of the Worlds. Those aliens were alien aliens, so unusual their morality, technology, and occasionally physiology. They were nigh-unstoppable, hellbent on eradicating or, more rarely, saving the Earth, and their technology was unthinkable in terms of modern science. Now look at aliens nowadays, such as in The Avengers, Transformers, Battleship, or Cowboys and Aliens. Especially look at their technology. They don't have ray guns or flying saucers, instead they have missile launchers or other practical weaponry, and ships that are highly-functional and maybe even probable in terms of science. In other words, they're no longer aliens, but more-advanced humans.
Why is this? What caused our view of aliens to change? Stick a standard UFO or a little green man in a modern movie and it'd look ridiculous. Give them alien ideologies or moralities and it'd seem out of place and might even break the suspension of disbelief, even if aliens themselves somehow didn't. Now every alien has to have a reason to invade the Earth that we can actually comprehend. Now their technology has to look like it could be ours in a few hundred years, rather than being so unusual or physics-defying that we can't ever hope to make something like it. But again, why is this?
Perhaps it is because that the idea of aliens isn't as far-fetched as it might have been back in the fifties and such. Now, with our super-powerful telescopes and our own small steps out into the void of space, we might actually be able to find them before they find us, something considered unthinkable decades ago. Maybe even we will be the ones to invade an alien planet, a concept movies like Avatar or Battle for Terra have explored. With this very real possibility, the idea of aliens doesn't seem so, well, alien anymore. We might be able to walk alongside them in a few centuries. This isn't something we could have ever anticipated back when H.G. Wells wrote War of the Worlds. Back then, another intelligence making its way across the cosmos to our little planet was something gods did, not mortals. But now we might be able to do it ourselves.
Now, we're taking the steps that aliens have taken in our movies, books, and video games for decades. And since we still have yet to fully confirm the existence of extraterrestrial life (unless the government is hiding it from the public to protect us or something) what we think aliens might be is much more something we could do ourselves. Thus, their technology and their ideologies are more like us as well. Aliens will always be in media, as the idea is still fascinating that we are not alone in the universe. But how they're represented will continue to change as we get closer and closer to doing what they do. And who knows? Maybe in a few centuries, we'll have flying saucers and ray guns.
