“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
Writer/director Josephine Rose’s feature debut opens both with this quote from the late sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke, and with a shower of meteors crashing into the Earth’s oceans. It is the near future – 28 September 2024, to be precise (a month to the day after the film’s world première) – but it will still be a month or so more before the implications of this celestial event start to take shape. Like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which Clarke co-wrote, Touchdown concerns the first, highly ambiguous contacts between humanity and a superior alien species – but apart from a few establishing shots from outside the Earth’s atmosphere at its beginning, Rose’s film, unlike Kubrick’s, takes place entirely on our planet’s surface, showing these mysterious, frightening encounters from the ground up.
In fact this is told mostly from the point of view of young London-based vlogger Jamie (Clinton Liberty), and his friends Emma (Cressida Bonas), Jerry (Will Attenborough), Chloe (Lily Frazer), and Pete (Kai Luke Bremmer) – a close-knit group but for the fact that they are dispersed across the globe in different cities and time zones. As an emergency gradually unfolds, leaving them housebound, under martial law and besieged by ‘vermin’-like creatures, their plans to get back together again are soon supplanted by hopes merely to stay in contact online and to remain alive. Nonetheless their efforts to reach out and to keep their love alive across the ether complement the attempts by the Earth’s newest arrivals to communicate with their hosts.
The Government and the military may wish to obliterate these strange interstellar invaders with both assault weapons and a media cover up, but Jamie and his friends are just trying to get by and to find truthful sources of information among both a blackout of concrete information on official channels and a confusing proliferation of unofficial citizen journalism, pirate broadcasts and enthusiastic conspiracy theories elsewhere. With the people in power, like Britain’s Prime Minister (Tim Downie), providing only glib bromides and empty rhetoric, and scientists with alternative perspectives, like Professor Margaret Dinsberg (Nancy Crane) or Professor Steven Landers (Jason Flemyng), either silenced or forced to go underground, good-natured Jamie, who preaches online against unnecessary fear, starts to wonder if the humans in charge might be more dangerous than aliens whose very existence, let alone intentions, have been kept under wraps and elude easy interpretation.
Touchdown offers a mediated, muddled view of first contact to illustrate how ill-prepared and inadequate we would likely be to comprehend something as extraordinary and awesome as extra-terrestrial life. It is like the realist fictions of Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield (2008) or Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 (2009), with an ensemble of characters who, without ever sharing the same space in real life, play out between them a dialectic on distance, distrust and the difficulties of truly connecting. This is truth as filtered by social media, where nothing is certain beyond our capacity for friendship with others.
Touchdown had its world première in the First Blood stand at FrightFest 2024 on 24 August
