It's late and I can't sleep and I was just reminded of this, so you get all get to hear me ramble about a movie that's probably older than a good portion of this site's userbase.

For those unfamiliar, Without Warning is a sci-fi movie which begins with aliens attempting to contact Earth by dropping asteroids into precise patterns in unpopulated areas. When an asteroid is aimed at the North Pole, human military forces intercept and destroy it with tactical nuclear weapons and, in the process, accidentally destroy an alien craft. The aliens retaliate by attempting to drop more asteroids on Beijing, Moscow, and Washington D.C. (okay, that last one is admittedly based), which humanity also intercepts and destroys with nuclear weapons. This leads to the final alien response, which is to swarm Earth with hundreds of asteroids, too many to intercept, aimed at every major urban center on Earth with the intention of completely annihilating every single one. The movie ends with the quote "The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves," the implication that humanity deserved and brought about its own destruction through its violent acts.

It's the implication that the destruction is self-inflicted and deserved that irks me because - and crucially, I don't think this was the artistic intention - the aliens in the movie come off wayyyyy worse than humanity. Yes, the humans are too trigger-happy and in the process kill some of the aliens, which is definitely bad. But the aliens' response isn't to de-escalate the situation or fuck off entirely, which they have the privilege of doing - nothing is obligating them to keep coming to Earth. Instead, they launch a massive retaliatory strike that would kill orders of magnitudes more than the destruction of their ship and, when this fails, the deliberate extermination of an entire population. You could actually draw a strong parallel between the aliens and a colonialist power - they show up where they don't need to be and aren't wanted, respond to violence with massive and indiscriminate retribution, and ultimately, commit genocide. It's the equivalent of carpet-bombing North Sentinel Island to avenge John Allen Chau.