Watch the average movie that tells the tale of our imagined encounters with extraterrestrial life and it becomes readily apparent that we don’t expect the meeting to go all that well.
There’s an inherent expectation that we will be invaded or annihilated or enslaved or accidentally expunged, or all of those things at once, and let’s face it, it’s a recurrent pessimistic trope because it makes for a good dramatic storyline.
But it doesn’t make for a exhaustively-complete picture of the human experience which is why, Scavengers, a breathtakingly-beautiful short film from Raphael Rogers, makes for such a reassuring, refreshing change.
It tells the story of a lonely traveller out in the vast reaches of the Milky Way who encounter Voyager probes 1 & 2 with their hopeful depictions of the human race and most poignantly for our scavenger who has only ever known “echoes of tragedy”, messages of friendly greetings and love.
After experiencing these messages, he is a man transformed, proof that maybe some aliens actually just a little, transformative loving.
Scavenger from Raphael Rogers on Vimeo.