Invasion:Earth - how quickly people believe

[Nursefoxfire]

We are watching a mini-series (originally released in the late 1990s) about an alien vs. alien battle that takes place over Scotland, and of course the Earth gets involved in it.

I thought it was interesting that the level-headed Squadron Leader (played by Phyllis Logan) is really painted as a "bad guy" in that she refuses to believe that what the pilots encountered was an alien spaceship. And we, as the viewing audience, are expected to go along with that. If it was the real world, we'd be agreeing with her.

It's funny how, in sci-fi movies, the leap from disbelief to belief happens almost seamlessly, and there are few skeptics standing around saying, "Hey waitaminnit, this can all be explained by more mundane explanations than that there are truly alien life forms crash-landing on Earth!"

 

[shadron]

This is a well-known phenomenon called "suspension of disbelief". The less a writer has to depend on that the better the story is, usually, but it's a normal part of the genre. Also, writers (particularly TV writers) love to portray realists are pedantic know-it-alls, particularly scientist and military stuffed-shirts. That is universal to all genres, a part of the cult of the anti-hero.

 

[Seismosaurus]

I've seen that series, it's great!

I remember the woman you are talking about. She's the typical hollywood parody-skeptic; it's not that she refuses to believe until there is solid evidence, it's that she point blank refuses to believe even when the evidence is overwhelming. Scully in the X Files was often similar.

 

[m_huber]

I'm a big fan of the X-files. Many times, though, I will be watching and yell out things like, "Non-sequitur!" when Mulder's logic goes crazy. Scully's answers to his ideas aren't always all that believable, either.

But that's why we call it fiction. We don't have aliens in the world, but it's fun to think about what things would be like if we did.