A Message from Mars (1913): The First Friendly Alien

New series, new stall to set out. For the next series we're following the history of the friendly alien screen, and as usual we're reaching back as far as we can before our 80s and 90s bias inevitably shows through. Which is how we've ended up starting in 1913.

A Message from Mars is the story of Horace Parker, a wealthy man who won't take Minnie to her dance, won't help a friend who's been sent to him for work, and would generally prefer everyone left him alone with his cigar and his newspaper. Enter Ramiel, a Martian who has evidently not been a good boy on Mars and has been packed off to Earth as punishment. His sentence: reform the most selfish man alive. He cannot go home until he does.

If that structure sounds familiar, it should. Selfish rich guy, supernatural visitor, forced tour of other people's suffering, moral rebirth. It's A Christmas Carol with the ghosts swapped out for a Martian, and honestly if you set out to adapt Dickens into science fiction this is exactly what you'd end up with.

So the question we keep circling back to on this one is what the friendly alien is actually for. Because it very rarely turns out to be about contact. Voltaire had a giant from Sirius looking down at us in 1752 and finding us tiny and self-important. Ramiel turns up with a zap power and a lesson. E.T. gets a government lab. The visitor is nearly always a mirror, and we nearly always come off badly in it. Which makes this the most quietly political corner of the genre, and something we'll be picking at all series.

There's also the question of how friendly Ramiel really is. He's stern, he's on a mission, and his methods are pure tough love. Is he friendly, or is he just contractually obliged?

In this one we get into where the line sits between a friendly visitor and an invader, how 1947 and a pilot over Mount Rainier locked in the flying saucer and the grey alien for good, some 1913 camera trickery we still can't work out, and the argument we could not let go of: are those Martians lizard people, or are they Arthurian courtiers? There is a very wide spectrum between those two things and we have landed nowhere on it.

Settle in. First contact starts here.

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Journey Through Sci-Fi is a sci-fi film history podcast hosted by James Payne and Matt Willcock, taking one big science fiction idea through the decades, two films at a time.

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