Review of The Visit: An Alien Encounter (2015) by Jp Q — 12 Aug 2015

I saw this at the 2015 Cleveland International Film Festival. This documentary-style film, not a true documentary, is unique. It asks what if! Madsen interviews various government, military, and scientific personnel, mostly focusing on European space organizations and western peace organizations like NATO and the UN.

What if alien life did land on Earth!? What is the official planned response of our leaders? Do we expect aliens to come in peace or to bring destruction? Will we show our baser violent nature or our higher compassionate nature to these unknown visitors? Of course this is all hypothetical and many scenes are quite surreal without ever showing an alien encounter.

Like science fiction, this is all still left to our vivid imaginations. Several of the interviewees suggest a "hope for the best, but plan for the worst" scenario. It is somewhat disheartening to witness some interviewees dumbfounded in expressing their fear of this unknown.

My favorite feature of this film was all the slow motion shots, some involving superimposed subjects seeming to float in the void, others simply showing everyday life interrupted when people turn to stare at something they have never seen before.

My wife disliked the hypothetical and slow moving aspects of this film. The fact that there are practically no facts to stand on and no plot bothered her more than it bothered me. The narrator asks questions that an alien might ask to better understand us humans, some questions that the interview subjects also ponder about alien life, so, you see, in trying to imagine life "out there" we are really faced with looking within and attempting to make sense of ourselves.