Ok, we just finished watching E.T. on television. It is the first time I’ve seen it since I was twelve, and now I’m finding myself with a completely different perspective on the story.
Elliot and his siblings should have been thrown in jail for treason and crimes against humanity! If he’d have gone to the authorities as soon as he found E.T., the government would have been able to communicate with him and discover all kinds of amazing information that could have advanced our civilization by hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Instead, what does he do?
HE HIDES THE ALIEN IN HIS FREAKING CLOSET and doesn’t tell anyone! Oh, except for some of his buddies at school. Amazing scientific discoveries, lost for all time! All because of one stupid little shit who decided the alien was “his”, and took him home and fed him candy and beer (and the alien almost immediately dies).
THEN, at the end, when Elliot has a chance to redeem himself by telling the government “Hey, the alien is waking up, his people are coming to pick him up and this is where they’re going to be” what does he do? He takes the alien and runs! They escape and our scientific horizons remain un-broadened! Not a shred of technology, not a single scientific discovery is left behind! No, the government is not the bad guys here. The bad guys are that little snot and his five criminal friends who impeded our advancement as a human race. I think Elliot and co should have been locked up for the rest of their lives. Heartwarming story my arse.
Nope. By showing E.T. kindness, Elliot saved the planet and should be lauded as a hero. Had he allowed the government to dissect the creature, Earth would have been destroyed to make room for an exit on the Intergalactic Expressway. By showing kindness, Elliot allowed E.T. to return home and arrange for Earth to be spared.
The government scientists did learn some stuff, just from the brief time they had access to E.T. I remember one of them calling out that he had DNA. Perhaps that was an artifact of the “link” between E.T. and Elliot, but if not, it’s really big news.
Some blame also needs to be put on the astonishing incompetence of the aliens. On coming to Earth, they don’t bother attempting to contact the incredibly obvious technological civilization covering much of the surface. Instead, they land in a random spot in the middle of nowhere, and then proceed to get out of the ship and wander around on the surface essentially naked. When the captain of the landing ship panics and leaves, he leaves a crew-member behind without even the alien equivalent of a cell phone to call for help. We’re probably better off without communicating with them.
I recall a Gahan Wilson cartoon: Inside a spaceship, Earth showing through the porthole. An ET general is addressing an army of ETs in armored spacesuits: “Before the invasion begins, I’d like to congratulate Colonel Glanf here on an amazingly successful propaganda campaign.”
Our society wouldn’t have been nearly sophisticated enough to handle such an exponential leap in technology. We would have just ended up building some kind of superweapon and blowing ourselves into teeny, tiny bits as fast as possible (unless the scientists dedicated to figuring out sexbot technology managed to outpace the superweapon scientists, in which case we would have all died of excessive orgasms). If anything, Elliott and his friends deserve a medal for saving us from ourselves.
The aliens knew we were here. If they had wanted to contact Earth, they would have done so. There was absolutely nothing the government could have done either way.
Yeah, didn’t the government folks prove themselves to be good guys in the end? They were only going to dissect ET after they thought he was dead, and they tried everything they could to revive him. I can understand Eliot’s initial reluctance to tell anyone (being a dumb kid and all), but there was no reason for him to run off with ET once he came back to life.
You know, I never thought about it before, but the aliens were pretty incompetent, weren’t they?And if ET had the technical know-how to send an intergalactic telephone signal with a Speak-N-Spell and a record player, why couldn’t the aliens on the ship figure out a way to communicate with him or locate him?
I always liked the gag they did on Robot Chicken, where ET turns out to have some alien version of Down’s Syndrome and the rest of his species can speak our language fluently (and make all ten of their fingers glow). Basically he just wandered off on a field trip or something.
They were botanists gathering plant specimens. I doubt if their orders included making contact with innately violent primates who still use fossil fuels as a source of energy.
The government needs to earn that level of trust, as to date they have not - so it would be immoral to hand ET over to the government, doing so would be like handing over a ‘Jew’ to the Nazis to be experimented on for medical research, sure there is a benefit, but the cost is way too high, would be wrong to do, and lead to the destruction of there nation in a karmic way.
Perhaps not, but their orders should have at the very least included contingency plans for what to do if you happen to run into innately violent primates unexpectedly or become separated from the rest of the botany team.
I’m conflicted about this. When I saw the film as a kid I had the impression that the government agents wanted to do something bad to ET, and on a purely selfish level he seemed like a nice guy to hang around with, and it was sad when he had to go. He should stayed with us for ever and ever…
But on reflection this was unfair. The government chaps do try to help ET; perhaps they’re distantly related to the government chaps from Close Encounters. But I get the impression that ET really didn’t want to be found and captured, and probably wasn’t interested in spending time explaining himself to the government men, not least because he seemed unable to cope with Earth’s environment. The whole “scary government men” angle is a bit of a throwback to the 1970s, The Parallax View and Six Days of the Condor and so on. The Man Who Fell to Earth. In fact that’s what I was thinking of; the government men in The Man Who Fell to Earth aren’t so much malicious as callous and incompetent. Which is adults all over, basically. Adults are callous and incompetent because they don’t have a sense of wonder, unlike children. Children would never torture small animals to death or say bad things. No, hang on, they would. But they would do it with a childlike sense of wonder, which makes things better.
Perhaps there were porn mags in that closet, dunno, and he enjoyed it in there. Maybe dad left behind his Playboy magazines when he left. And these would have been late-70s Playboy magazines, before Photoshop, back when the models had tonnes of pubic hair and you could sometimes see rude bits.