Wow, this is messed up!


He kills those aliens for no reason whatsoever! Can someone give me some historical context here, please? At the time, was that considered acceptable behavior? "All is fair in love and exploration?" Or would that have made the guy a huge dick in the eyes of contemporary audiences as well? The way the group is greeted when they come back to earth makes me think it's the former but maybe I'm missing some subtext here.

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Yeah, it's pretty weird! Still a really cool movie, but seriously.

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The film is supposed to be satirical.

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Could you elaborate on that a bit? Satirical of what?

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(the following taken from this link: http://www.filmsite.org/voya.html):

"The silent film's plot, a light-hearted satire criticizing the conservative scientific community of its time, was inspired by Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and H. G. Wells' First Men in the Moon (1901)."

On top of that quote, you could also say "A Trip to the Moon" mocks Victorian society a bit as well.

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Soooo, you're saying either the scientific community or the Victorian society at large was known for literally or figuratively killing everything they didn't know?

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Not necessarily, but satire is normally exaggerated, They were supposed to look like cowards of some sort.

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Ok, that makes some amount of sense I guess. Thanks!

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To get an idea of what the European mentality was at the time, read the intro to "War of the Worlds" Just paraphrasing, the men on Earth thought the men of other worlds would welcome a missionary expedition. The send up that H.G. Wells was sending was the hubris of the English who just assumed they were all powerful and any "less advanced" society would welcome their endeavors with open arms. They invaded and took over other countries for their own good. Seriously, it was something called "The White Man's Burden". In War of the Worlds though this is completely upended by a much more advanced society who didn't care about their alleged superiority.

So in this film a bunch of European explorers go to a place and encounter stereotypical natives who they promptly kill. To see that treatment in such over the top fashion was to put the mirror back on their own society. So yeah, the filmmakers were satirizing colonization and the treatment of natives.

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"So yeah, the filmmakers were satirizing colonization and the treatment of natives."

Lol, don't be so ridiculous...

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[deleted]

Well, what counts as "aggressive" should be assessed very carefully when dealing with an alien species. Plus killing them all because one of them pissed you off is racist ;)

But of course people back then didn't have access to the wealth of Star Trek episodes to drive these lessons home that we enjoy nowadays :)

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Lol, I was thinking the same thing! Poor aliens, they were just defending themselves against intruders!☹

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