‘Scavengers Reign’ Is Changing the Definition of Science Fiction – Armessa Movie News

Editor’s note: The below article contains spoilers for the first three episodes of Scavengers Reign.

Scavengers Reign is the new flagship animated show on Max, and it’s one of the more creatively groundbreaking shows of the year. It’s pure science fiction, and starts with a familiar premise: Five crew members of a deep space cargo hauler have crash-landed on the uncharted planet of Vesta Minor. But that’s where the familiarity ends. Scavengers Reign – which has been expanded into a series from an earlier short film by creators Joe Bennett and Charles Huettner – sets its sights, nearly single-mindedly, on one of the oldest goals of all science fiction, and achieves it. Only three episodes of Scavengers Reign have been released so far, but already, the show has made quite a statement.

RELATED LINK: ‘Scavengers Reign’ Review: A Beautifully Animated Sci-Fi Epic

Some Aliens Feel More Familiar Than Others in ‘Scavengers Reign’

When I was a kid, my uncle gave me a copy of Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials. It was a “guidebook” containing detailed illustrations of some of the most iconic alien species from the pages of science fiction literature. I read the hell out of that book. As I became more familiar with it, I saw that the aliens broke down pretty neatly into two groups. There were the humanoid species, which had arms and legs, wore clothes, and would be played by an actor wearing prosthetics if the book were ever to be adapted into film. Recognizable personality shone through the illustrations: the bear-like warrior Dilbian! The sinister and secretive Pnume! But even more fascinating were the species that bore little resemblance to life on earth, except maybe organisms you could only see under a microscope. What to make of the Uchjinian, whose physical form the guidebook describes as “an extremely pliable smear of matter”? The book listed the novels each alien came from, but it was still hard to imagine. How could you tell a story about a smear of matter?

I never became much of a reader of sci-fi novels. (I never even tried to find or read Exiles at the Wells of Souls by Jack L. Chalker – where the pliable Uchjinians were first brought to life.) But many years of watching science fiction movies and television has never quite answered this question. Most of the aliens I’ve encountered in movies are either basically humans, with a slightly different culture, such as the various beloved alien races of the Star Trek universe. Or, they are a monster that wants to rip people apart, as in Alien. (Sometimes both!) But of course, alien life could be anything, and we know that. We make fun of Star Trek all the time for presenting us with aliens that are just humans with an extra bump somewhere. It’s just that it’s hard to imagine something new. Especially in expensive visual mediums like animation, where there are higher stakes in taking risks, and where the storytelling is presented visually, without access to our protagonists’ thoughts. But imagining something new is what Scavengers Reign attempts to do.

‘Scavengers Reign’ Introduces Us to a New World of Creatures – on Their Own Planet

You could say that we go through cycles of comfort and frustration with the limits of our own imagination. When A Quiet Place came out, it really did very little to advance the basic idea of what an alien is, beyond adding the wrinkle of making them very sensitive to sound. They were retreads of the xenomorphs from Alien, and that was fine. More recent alien movies have pushed the envelope more. Both 2022’s Nope and this past year’s No One Will Save You have worked within the framework of flying saucers and little green men, but both put in work to make the familiar seem strange. The “saucer” of Nope is actually a biological creature, while the aliens of No One Will Save You are depicted as having a deep and inscrutable culture that is genuinely beyond our comprehension. (Their language of dance moves alone really makes an impression.)

But those takes on the alien have something in common. They are about aliens that came here, to Earth — which means they must have a motive of some kind, one that can be at least partially understood through their actions. Scavengers Reign doesn’t even have this. The characters of this show have crash-landed on the unsuspecting world of Vesta Minor, a planet that is teeming with life, but doesn’t seem to have any advanced form of society, or technology. None of the creatures on this planet have ever seen a human before, or have a pre-existing idea of what to do with one. Instead, it’s our human characters who are the invaders.

The cast of characters is small, with only five surviving the wreckage of their ship, the Demeter, and is scattered, having landed on Vesta Minor in separate escape pods. There are Ursula and Sam (Sunita Mani and Bob Stephenson), Azi and her robotic assistant Levi, (Wunmi Mosaku and Alia Shawkat), and Kamen (Ted Travelstead), who is alone and traumatized. Each of these groups has landed in a slightly different climate and must learn to understand their environment in order to survive. And because the humans are unexpected visitors, Vesta Minor’s alien species can play their cards very close to the vest. Much of the life on this planet is of the Uchjinian variety – a smear of matter whose form doesn’t make it easy for a human to tell which end is up. This makes the breakthroughs of our human characters more meaningful. When Sam and Ursula realize they can wait out a storm inside the egg sack of a sea beast, it’s delightful.

‘Scavengers Reign’ Is an Immersive Experience — Because It’s So Weird

One of the problems with aliens that have become overly familiar is that, as an audience member, it’s harder to forget that you’re just watching a movie. Some part of us always knows that the reason Kryptonians look exactly like humans is to make it easier on the storytellers. In reality, aliens will not look like us; what we are watching is fake. Because the team behind Scavengers Reign has done the work of figuring out how to tell a story without the convenience of aliens that speak English, a different sort of immersion takes place. You feel more like you are actually there, on a new planet.

The interesting thing is that the story does not accomplish this immersion by allowing us to go on a voyage of discovery with our stranded human characters. One of the most unexpected choices the show makes is to begin the story several months after the wreck of the Demeter. Our humans have been learning how to exist on this planet for quite a while, and have made a lot of discoveries already. One of the first lines of spoken dialogue is “I can’t believe we did it,” as we see that Sam and Ursula have already figured out how to extract enzymes from the bizarre flora and fauna of Vesta Minor and use them to fix their radio equipment. On the other side of the planet, Avi, designed to be a helpful robot, has an alien moss growing in its circuitry and is becoming independent. These characters have already become a little alien themselves before we’ve met them. We’re playing catchup, on our own separate journey.

Meanwhile, the show seems to be foreshadowing that the human characters we identify with at the start might come to be seen as villains as the story progresses. The Demeter, famously, was also the name of the ship that brought Dracula to England. In survival mode, our characters have brought a lot of death to the planet of Vesta Minor, without feeling any guilt about it. After all, the alien life they’ve encountered doesn’t speak English, or any discernible language. It is the kind of life that humans have come to think of as disposable here on Earth. But is it possible that, by the end of the show’s first season, we will come to identify more with the blobby, non-verbal alien creatures of Vesta Minor than with our own species? That would be a special accomplishment, one that would really push the boundaries of what the genre of science fiction can accomplish.

One thing is for certain: Scavengers Reign is one of those rare TV shows where it is genuinely uncertain what’s going to happen next. We have finally, at long last, set foot on alien terrain.

New episodes of Scavengers Reign premiere Thursdays on Max.