Two Decades of First-Contact Cinema: The 20 Greatest Films About Humanity and the Unknown
To the point
Over twenty years of first-contact cinema, this collection shows how encounters with extraterrestrial life reveal humanity’s language, culture, ethics, and identity across a spectrum of tones and genres—from contemplative epics to large-scale entertainments—through films by Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, James Cameron, Neill Blomkamp, and Roland Emmerich such as E.T., Alien, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arrival, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Abyss, District 9, Independence Day, and The War of the Worlds.
