Quote Originally Posted by Beekeeper View Post
The argument that Hollywood is priming us to be afraid doesn't really take into account the history of Science fiction. Generally there's a long tradition of aliens representing "the other" as manifest on earth itself. Sci-Fi often works like analogy and all works are products of their context. Frightful aliens can, psychologically speaking, represent any number of threats that their respective creators experience within their cultural/historical contexts or even, more simply, the shadow self. When you do investigate with an open mind you find a lot of horror stories of malevolent beings as well as those that don't seem to intend harm or damage and Hollywood likewise presents different types.
An interesting example of this good-bad spectrum diversity is the movies of Steven Spielberg. On the one hand we have the benign type with e.g. "ET The Extraterrestial" and "Close Encounters Of The 3rd Kind". On the other hand we have the bad and highly superior Earth invaders with "War Of The Worlds", "Transformers" or his newest TV show "Falling Skies".

What strikes me: The 'good' ETs were from the 70ies/80ies. The bad ones are of a newer date (Concededly with WOTW being a remake, but still...).

So the conspiracy freak is tempted to ask: Is there a trend?

(Besides: Same trend applies to war or military movies in genera, with or without any monster aliens (such as the infamous "Battle L.A." or similar ones). In general, there are so many movies that seem to almost exalt the military way. There are no real anti-war movies made anymore, imho. There is nothing critical of the military or of war business. War seems to be the 'natural way' to solve conflicts and every marine is automatically a hero. Even the pop music business seems to be 'in it' now. It is rumoured that the Pentagon has a say in many of these scripts, also since they send their consultants or even lend some of the weaponry to the filmmakers, not without their own 'hidden' motives, as it seems.).