Boring has long been part of the territory when it comes to imagining our first contact with aliens. Apart from Richard Dreyfuss moulding mashed potato, Close Encounters of the Third Kind is really dull. There isn’t a black hole big enough to consume all the tedium produced by Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner in Arrival. The disappointing truth about aliens is that hardly any of them, perhaps none, are as cute as ET.
Nic Stacey’s film First Contact: An Alien Encounter (BBC Two) honours this sci-fi sub-genre by being quite dull. Although it is billed as a dramatisation about what it would be like for us to encounter extraterrestrials, all we get is fuzzy mocked-up footage of space debris and a radio signal that probably isn’t Test Match Special but a cryptic message sent from a planet several hundred light years away. In thinly dramatised sequences, news anchors wax excitable and small boys interviewed in the street get very animated about the possibility that little green gender-indeterminate entities are coming.
