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Aliens who are kind, intelligent and genocidal? Author fail.

posted 10 years ago by gehrken_de
31 replies | jump to latest

I saw the movie and read half of the book, but I just don't get the premise:
The Aliens are
- intelligent. This is shown by their technological knowhow. They are also very experienced because of their age.
- kind. They are not merely kind, they are the kindest and gentlest and best in the whole universe.
- genocidal. They have killed off nearly the whole of humanity which would be around 7 billion and that was not the first race.

These three things together are completely implausible or rather outright impossible.
- If they are kind and intelligent, they would not do what they did. They claim it is because humans are murderous and ruin the planet. But this argument fails as they kill off all humans including those who fight these very problem. Intelligent and kind people would try to find another way then all-out murder. Even in human history there are only a few cases where complete murder has been tried and even in those cases it was clear even to the killers that they did something wrong. The souls surpass any of these human cruelties by far. Their argument comes off as rather made up because it's more convenient for them to condemn as many humans as possivle in order to get more hosts so that more souls can have a good experience.
- If they are kind and murderous, they must be completely dumb. Actually the author tries to convey this combination. The souls as a whole failed to even get the hint when the seaweed people rather chose suicide than occupation. Wanda as an individual who is more than 1000 years old and took part in several genocides does not seem to grasp it. But none of them is dumb, their intelligence and morality is shown.
- If they are intelligent and murderous, it would fit. It would like most other alien invasion scenarios.

I was really annoyed when Wanda became enraged after finding out what the doc did. 'Ohh, we killed billions of humans and I myself killed lots of people from all races. And we did not do it to survice, we just want to have a good and cool lifestyle experience and all of that is a-ok. But don't you dare touch a soul! If you kill a single soul by trying to rescue a human, you are an evil monster!' It is very convenient that no other character calls her out on that.

I get that the author wanted another take on the normal 'evil aliens invade' scenario. She constructs this but fails to make it even slightly plausible. It does not make sense.
I really wanted to like the story because I like the people who made the movie (Niccol, Hurt, Ronan, Kruger). I feel sorry for them. They could only fail with the source material they were given.

[–] linefreak 9 years ago

The problem is that the 'souls' don't see taking over a body as murdering the 'person' inside. It's how they survive on their home world. We survive by eating other organisms, & while some see this as murder, it's still how we stay alive. Also, just because you are kind doesn't mean you'll never do unkind things, knowingly or unknowingly. The souls themselves have only a handful of personality traits (kindness, compassion, honesty, probably 1 or 2 I'm forgetting), the rest gets shaped by their hosts' characteristics, so if the hosts are emotionless, or simply don't feel things as strongly, or if they have more aggressive traits, the souls will react to their body's traits (which may include wanting to eliminate the threat of uninhabited bodies).
The other thing to keep in mind is the info they were acting off of. If all the souls knew about Earth was that the most sentient/advanced species was violent, cruel, selfish, and unaccepting of what is different, of course their first move would be to inhabit as many bodies as possible so they would have a strong footing on the planet w/ minimal opposition/fighting. And the humans *did fight back when they realized what was happening, which resulted in soul deaths, which meant the souls had to protect themselves by getting rid of the opposition (unoccupied humans). Then they began repairing the damage humans caused, which gave them justification for taking over the human bodies. It took 1 on 1 experience with a human conscious, seeing things from their perspective, & witnessing the good side of humanity instead of just the negative side before the protagonist realized they were erasing people/lives.
You also have to think of the perspective of the souls overall. If their goal is to experience life on another planet, but the only way to survive & do that is by taking over bodies of other species, then they're not going to think it wrong to do so. They're just making 'people' move out of their way so they can live how they want to (something that's happened throughout human history, & none of them thought it was wrong at the time). Plus, the souls are not omnipotent, and they're not perfect; so seeing another option probably wasn't as obvious to them as one thinks it should have been. So your argument that the entire concept of intelligent, kind, 'genocidal' aliens is implausible is not entirely accurate (in my opinion).

Also, Wanderer wasn't upset because of what Doc did, she was mortified that her fellow souls, her family, were basically butchered & left on the gurney/table like they weren't living, feeling creatures who probably died in agony. And Jeb does call her out on continuing to act as though souls were completely innocent of any kind of murder; he just gave her the space to grieve over those specific souls' brutal deaths before trying to tell her this point in a rational manner.
Does this make the writing without flaw? I will say no, not necessarily. However, considering the writer is not omnipotent &/or perfect, I think she did a better job than you're saying she did.

[–] ErlandGadde 9 years ago

Most of us humans, myself for example, eat meat, meaning that we allow animals to get killed to become food. Still, most of us consider us kind and intelligent. So, are the souls worse than us?

Our justification for eating animals is that we consider them inferior to humans. Likewise, the souls consider the humans inferior to themselsves, and they justify this by the violent nature of humans. Their kindness and non-violence were primarily directed against their own species, just as us. They had evoloved to become kind and non-violent towards themselves, and had internalized this in their ethics.

Wanda learned to empathize with humans through Melanie's feelings and her own close contact to humans, so she could extend her natural kindness to humans, and she came to understand the genocidal aspect at a deep level. Few other souls had the same experience.

Other species infected by the souls probably hadn't so strong emotions as humans, and therefore the souls rarely were conscious of this dilemma before.