As I said above, the story of evil humans coming and despoiling an alien planet is nothing new in written science fiction. Off the top of my head, there's Ursula LeGuin's The Word For World Is Forest, among others. I'm almost done reading Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods (review coming soon) which deals with this theme. But I can't think of too many movies which have handled this type of storyline. (Enemy Mine, I guess.)

We still don't know all of the plot details for James Cameron's Avatar, coming in 2009, but an early "scriptment" that's reputed to be real includes a lot of information. In a nutshell, Earth is ruined due to centuries of exploitation, and we've used up all our resources. So we decide to go and plunder the mineral wealth of the planet Pandora, whose atmosphere is poisonous to us. Humans can only walk around on Pandora by growing special alien bodies, akin to the native Na'vi aliens. The humans can control their own vat-grown Na'vi bodies, which are called avatars. (We don't know how much of this stuff survives in the final script, but Sigourney Weaver's comments about her character having "her own avatar" make it sound as though it's still there in some form.)

In addition to these surrogate aliens, the humans have also landed some bloodthirsty troops who hate the natives and want to wipe them out. So there's a conflict between the Avatar-using humans, who want to understand the natives (who are basically Native Americans) and the power-armor-using troops, who want to bulldoze all the natives' sacred lands and kill them all. This leads to a speech by our hero, Josh:

Pandora is not Hell, it's Eden. And Eden is being bulldozed and stripmined and raped. We have no right. We are the aliens here. We are the space monsters.

If that sounds too subtle for you, then there's Terra, which we covered the other day. The new full-length animated film is about humans coming to terraform a planet of peaceloving aliens, after Earth has become basically uninhabitable. We already terraformed Venus and Mars, but then the planets had a huge civil war. So now we have to come and use our transforming device to turn Terra's helium atmosphere into oxygen.

Are you seeing a trend here? The stories about humans as scourge of the cosmos are what come after the post-apocalyptic Earth stories. We ruin our own planet, so we have to go and fuck up someone else's planet. (That's also the storyline in the Winterson book, where Orbus is about to become unable to support human life.) There could also be some guilt about the Iraq war and our various other foreign adventures, which we could be excising.

There's also the remake of the original humans-are-assholes movie The Day The Earth Stood Still, coming this December, in which peaceful aliens warn us not to take our asshole ways out into space. And there's a new direct-to-DVD sequel to Starship Troopers coming out in a couple of months. In the original Troopers, director Paul Verhoeven's aim was to show that humans were the aggressors and the bugs were simply reacting to human colonies encroaching on their territory. This message flew over a lot of people's heads, so maybe Troopers scriptwriter Ed Neumeier (who's directing the new movie) will make it more blatant this time around.

And then there's also the animated Planet 51, starring the Rock, in which the peaceful aliens think the humans are there to invade and despoil their planet. But they're wrong... or are they?

I guess there's not enough examples there to argue that this is a sweeping new trend. And of course the post-apocalyptic Earth movie has one major advantage over the alien world epic: it's cheap to film, since you can make a post-apocalyptic landscape almost anywhere you can find some rubble.

The 3-D film, which was originally supposed to be distributed by New Line but is now coming out on Warner Bros., is about astronaut Capt. Charles "Chuck" Baker, who leads an expedition to the title world, which is inhabited by those human-fearing aliens, who dress like humans from the 1950s. Says Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson:

I go on their planet, and I'm actually the alien... Of course, I befriend a little boy [to try to] get back to my spaceship. It's really great.

Planet Due in Late 09 [Sci-Fi Wire]

Planet 51 is about a planet of paranoid aliens who are terrified of invaders. So when astronaut Chuck Baker (The Rock) shows up, they fear the worst. That in itself doesn't sound too bad, but the presence of a young cowardly alien trying to overcome his fears by helping Chuck evade capture, return to his spaceship and find his way home tends to suggest that there may be an uplifting Elton John-esque ballad or two in there somewhere, between culture-shock jokes and "Hey, aliens are, you know, just like us, why don't we all love each other?" moments. Biel and Long play aliens who fall in love. And Seann William Scott (Stiffler from American Pie) will play another alien.

The film's directed by Jorge Blanco, better known as the chief graphic artist on 1998's Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines PC game. It's due to be finished by March of next year, at which point we can all fondly remember such cinematic greats as Happy Feet. Click here for more pics. [Variety.com]

This film marks the first time that New Line will be venturing into the waters dominated by Disney/Pixar and Dreamworks Animation, and interestingly enough it was written by Joe Stillman, who wrote both Shrek and Shrek 2 for Dreamworks. The film will be directed by Jorge Blanco, who created the Commandos video games for the PlayStation 2 back in 1998.

New Line will apparently be activating their marketing juggernaut for the film. Ilion CEO Ignacio Perez Dolset said, "The deal has been made with the objective on everybody's part of going out on no fewer than 3,000 screens."

That means New Line will be spending an amount of money equal to the budget or more in an effort to put people in the seats and sell a ton of Planet 51 merchandise and video games. Let's hope they fare better than Fox did when they released Titan A.E. That sci fi animated film tanked in 2000, and single-handedly shut down Fox Animation Studios. Still, New Line won't be selling their shirts for this one, since they're only buying the U.S. distribution rights.

Based on the pictures they've released, and if they're able to attach some A-list voice talent, they might give the other players in the CGI pool a run for their money. If Planet 51 manages to capture any of the whimsy of The Iron Giant, we're in.

New Line Lands On 'Planet 51' [Variety]