It
is depressing to think we might be better prepared for first contact with extraterrestrial
life than the next terrorist attack. Still, if the aliens ever do come, we will
be glad these academics and bureaucrats put some thought into our response.
Danish filmmaker Michael Madsen puts them through a dress rehearsal of sorts in his
documentary-essay The Visit, which screens
during the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.
So
here is the hypothetical: aliens have finally arrived and announced themselves.
Madsen has his various expert commentators talk into the camera as if they were
greeting and/or negotiating with the extra-worldly beings. Some of them make a
lot of sense, such as the biologist maintaining quarantine until each species
can determine the threat levels of the opposite race’s bacteria. Of course,
this is just as important for the Visitors, considering what happened when they
landed at Grover’s Mill in 1938.
The
philosophers want to know whether they understand the concepts of good and evil
as we know them, which might be practical information, particularly if they do
not. Meanwhile, the British press and security officers are not so subtly
trying to determine their intentions and agree on some sort of joint statement
that will not cause panic. Finally, the former director of the UN’s Office of
Outer Space Affairs is delighted to finally have something to justify the
agency’s budgets.
Despite
the subject matter, there are not a lot of call backs to science fiction in The Visit. However, you can hear echoes
of 2001: a Space Odyssey when one
commentator gives an imaginative description of his journey inside the alien
capsule, somehow decked out to resemble the great entry hall of a European
Museum. It is a striking sequence, veering close to outright speculative
fiction.
Viewers
should be warned, The Visitor shares
the same austere aesthetic sensibility of Madsen’s previous documentary, Into Eternity, a tour of the state-of-the-art,
subterranean Onkalo nuclear waste storage facility, before it was sealed off
from all human contact for the rest of infinity. It should also be rather
telling that auterist documentarian Nikolaus Geyrhalter served as a
co-producer. Madsen stages some grand set pieces and cinematography Heikki Färm
give them all a glossy sheen, but the net effect is often as lulling as it is
transfixing.
