Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Declan Baxter, Georgia May Foote, Vicki Pepperdine, Bruce Mackinnon, Amanda Abbington, Evelyn Monk, Laurance Rickard, Joe Thomas, Ben Willbond, Mike Wozniak, Rob Delaney, Miles Jupp, Lucien Laviscount, Ellie White, Roya Amini, Dane Baptiste, Christine Barton-Brown, Paul Coldrick, Glen Davies, Trev Fleming, Aoibhin Murphy, Ali Mylon, Daniel Ogbeide-John, Peter Slater, Rebecca Yeo.
If ever you want proof of why intelligent lifeforms from beyond our star and our imagination have never tried to contact humanity, to take over the Earth in some kind of twisted sense of morality and revenge for all the times we have portrayed them as bloody thirty murders hell bent on destroying humanity, then you only have to consider that the one singular reason is they would have to run the entire show; and they are not stupid, they understand full well that power alone is not enough to deal with the insanity of bureaucracy.
We Are Not Alone, there are surely thousands of alien races out there in the depths of space who would come to the same conclusion as us, that we are not worth bothering with because we rely on stupidity and adherence to petty rules to keep the world turning, and yet it is always fun to play the what if ? game…what if an alien species did invade and not annihilate, but slowly become immersed in the same squabbles over time keeping, management protocol, and how throwing money at a problem is not always the appropriate response for any commander-in-chief to argue for.
From two of the creative minds behind the phenomenally successful Ghosts, Laurence Rickard and Ben Willbond, is the proof of how humanity can fight back against alien invasion simply by showing how inept they are by stooping down to our level. This is the price of conquest, eventually you realise that you weren’t superior, you just had a finer grasp on public relations.
Directed by Fergus Costello, We Are Not Alone witnesses performances from the likes of Declan Baxter, Vicki Pepperdine, Amanda Abbington, and Joe Thomas, which catch the eye of surrealism and comedy. The sense of the understatement is fiercely defended by the situation and the cause and effect that follows, especially in the interactions between Declan Baxter’s Stewart and Joe Thomas’ Greggs, an alien almost as inept and uncool as any that have come before, is one to take great heart from.
Hopefully there will be more to come from the crew of the Clitheroe local town office, but until there is another reason to find aliens the source of fear, we should always remember that we are not alone, there are races out there just as wonderfully incompetent as us.
Ian D. Hall