| rdfs:comment
| - Given how Berg seems to base his premise on the idea that any contact with an alien species might be inherently harmful, no matter what our (or their) intent, and the minimum development and focus on the aliens, it is possible the whole conflict was a gigantic misunderstanding. After all, the Americans fire the first shot - albeit a warning shot - leading the aliens to respond in force. When the aliens do respond with force, they are initially more concerned with disabling infrastructure rather than causing harm. One alien avoids killing a kid, and another repeatedly pushes a human aside, rather than killing him.
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| abstract
| - Given how Berg seems to base his premise on the idea that any contact with an alien species might be inherently harmful, no matter what our (or their) intent, and the minimum development and focus on the aliens, it is possible the whole conflict was a gigantic misunderstanding. After all, the Americans fire the first shot - albeit a warning shot - leading the aliens to respond in force. When the aliens do respond with force, they are initially more concerned with disabling infrastructure rather than causing harm. One alien avoids killing a kid, and another repeatedly pushes a human aside, rather than killing him. Sure, we assume that the aliens are signalling home to call an invasion, but we never get confirmation one way or the other. All we have is the (rational) fears of the human characters. From the alien perspective, they've just lost one of their ships and come under fire from the natives. It makes sense they'd want to establish communication home. The theory's expanded a bit here
* I don't think this counts as a WMG, since the director has explicitly said as much. The article description even said so for a time.
* Against that theory is a) the weird, psychic vision...thing that the main character experienced and b) if that was the case, they're clearly not very good at it. Violently crashing into a planet's major population centres is gonna start you off on the wrong foot, different species or no...
* The vision thing is a jumble of images that the lead can't make sense of outside the fact that it feels bad. Of course it feels bad, that thing seems to have dumped his memories into the poor man's head. Sure, we see images that could be war, but the film avoids giving the lead dialogue like, for example, the President's "locusts" explanation in Independence Day.
* I thought that population centre thing was an accident? Their communications device thingy winged a satellite (poor driving), and got damaged and knocked off course. It could be that they either misconstrued this as an act of aggression or figured "hey, to be on the safe side, let's contact home before anything happens" and things just sort of spiralled from there.
* As intriguing as this theory is, it is all Jossed by the novelization written by Peter David. The aliens (who refer to themselves as "Regents" in the novel) are here to investigate and evaluate humanity's potential as a threat. This is the real reason why they leave humans alone when not being fired upon: they are waiting for the humans to attack them first so they can properly see how dangerous the threat level is. The novelization also reveals that the reason why the Regents' fleet is so weak is possibly because of idiocy and/or political jockeying among the Regents' leaders: the Regent in charge of the fleet at Earth (called the "Land Commander") has a very low opinion of his superior, the "World Commander", believing that the World Commander does not understand how to fight a war properly and assigned him vastly insufficient firepower. The Land Commander knows his forces are woefully ill-prepared to fight a planetary population and are forced to scrounge human technology to build a transmitter that can signal his people that they really need reinforcements.
* Another point in the Land Commander's thought processes reveals that the Regents are stretched thin across the galaxy, so the World Commander really may not have had any other forces to spare to send to Earth. He thinks it still doesn't make the World Commander any less of an idiot, though.
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![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)