MovieChat Forums > Quatermass and the Pit (1958) Discussion > a little Martian pathos

a little Martian pathos

posted 13 years ago by bastasch8647
2 replies | jump to latest

I felt a wee bit bad for the fate of the Martians - in adapting proto-hominids for carrying the remnants of their culture, they were only doing what they needed to do.

The film establishes that their great experiment was a failure because even the adapted proto-hominids "fell back into savagery" and failed as Martian culture-bearers. Only a small bit of Martian culture remained mostly dormant in human genes, the only exception to the rule being the unpredicted, random discovery of the crashed Martian ship - which quite accidentally caused an unprecedented resurgence of "the Martian" in the modern humans of London.

So the issue for me goes beyond the expected response of, "Well, I'd rather be a human than a bug". It involves a sense of pathos for the fallen Martian civilization, much as in HP Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness", where the author concludes that the lost alien civilization, whatever else they were, "were men, scientists to the last". I get that kind of feeling in contemplating the fate of the Quatermass Martians.

[–] g-of-warks2-1 11 years ago

Yes, I know what you mean. I remember thinking that even if the Martian regime was not very pleasant, then that did not follow that all of the Martians were bad. Extinction for any speies is bad. Especially an intelligent one.

[–] lorenzb-2 9 years ago

It was a noble experiment and a good try on the Martians part. It didn't completely fail because we did after much time, become the dominant species on earth. We really didn't carry on with their civilization and culture like they planned, but perhaps that was unrealistic to begin with. It was a last desperate attempt to survive in some way. We'd do the same thing. Like Quatermass said: "It was better than nothing."