It's commonplace for the most thoughtful and probing sci-fi texts to tackle contemporary issues through the lens of a fantastical setting or concept. Perhaps due to its own budget constraints, no sci-fi film has ever felt more perceptible to modern social sensibilities quite like The Brother From Another Planet, the groundbreaking satire on race, immigration, and cultural assimilation by John Sayles.
The politically-conscious writer-director behind Matewan and Lone Star, Sayles, who worked closely with Joe Dante on Piranha and The Howling, and graduated from the Roger Corman school of exploitation filmmaking, was the ideal fit for a farcical black comedy with nuanced social commentary. Starring Joe Morton as a mute alien humanoid, the uber-relevant The Brother From Another Planet shows that any perceived outsider, whether it be a three-toed extraterrestrial or an everyday Black individual, will feel like an aimless migrant who crash-landed on to a lawless oasis.
Image via Cinecom Pictures
John Sayles, who has made heartfelt dramedies and biographical baseball movies, is a versatile filmmaker, but the one throughline in his filmography is his urgent social commentary. In Matewan, he emphasized the necessity of labor unions, and in Lone Star, he tackled America's complex relationship with law enforcement and the figurative and literal burial of the nation's sins. With The Brother From Another Planet, Sayles combined his genre flair with probing social reflection of the current state of America, as the film follows the unnamed Brother (Morton), an escaped alien slave resembling a Black man who is bewildered by his new home on planet Earth, specifically, New York City. Blessed with spiritual powers, the Brother can heal all wounds and fix any machine with a simple touch. Still, he experiences the sobering realities of life as an immigrant, as he is pursued by two special agents played by Sayles and his favorite recurring star, David Strathairn, looking to deport him.
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Stylistically, notably from its grainy visual aesthetic and grimy urban setting, The Brother From Another Planet evokes 1970s Blaxploitation movies. The farcical concept of an alien disguised as a Black person and the unfortunate circumstances of having to deal with everyday discrimination would be comfortable territory for Melvin Van Peebles. The independent film, shot by future filmmaker and Spike Lee collaborator, Ernest Dickerson, never attempts to mimic any glossy sci-fi imagery, which lures the viewer into reading the text as a raw reflection of contemporary America. With its vignette structure, the film carries the likeness of a silent comedy, with Joe Morton thriving as a modern-day Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton.
'The Brother From Another Planet' Reflects on Contemporary Society Through a Mute Alien
The closest thing to a futuristic milieu is the hall of faulty arcade machines that the Brother is commissioned to repair through his magic touch, which indicates that society lives out the Brother's origins through space-set video games like Asteroids and Galaga. The plethora of broken arcade cabinets suggests a societal decay and an egregious lack of technological progress, which is quite jarring for the Brother, who imagined America as the promised land. Even for an escaped slave from a distant planet, America does not prove to be the home of the free, as people only accept his eccentric ways once he provides monetary value to the local bar or arcade.
The Brother From Another Planet is a complete counter to the image of American exceptionalism prevalent in the 1980s, and this is also true of the films dominating the multiplexes during the decade, notably the action blockbusters built upon excess. To compare it to the most financially successful film of the decade, John Sayles described his satirical alien film as "The Black E.T. movie." Where Steven Spielberg's friendly extraterrestrial gave a lonely boy hope and wonder, Sayles' disheveled, wordless alien is immediately treated like a perverse outsider or a source of exploitation, even in a melting pot in NYC.
Like the title creature in E.T., however, the Brother learns about his new home through art and emotional reactions, such as when he connects with a painting of abolitionist Harriet Tubman, identifying her escape from slavery as a shared experience. When he witnesses the fatalistic nature of drug abuse and the grueling effect of the drug on the body, the Brother storms into a dealer's office and forces him to watch the harrowing impact of drug use through his electronic eye. Sayles uses a pure, unvarnished alien not corrupted by the everyday woes of American life to enforce simple morals on humanity without relying on didactic commentary. Due to our thorny political and social climate, The Brother From Another Planet has taken on a new life 40 years later. John Sayles' film is one part sci-fi, one part biting satire, one part shaggy New Hollywood neo-realism, and one part hopeful allegory on race and immigration in America.
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