Image Credit: Amazon MGM Studios
“I’m a legal alien, I’m an Englishman in New York,” sang Sting. The song celebrates the importance of maintaining one’s identity, especially when moving far from home, but it also evokes the difficulties faced by anyone who has lived abroad and encountered challenges in trying to form lasting relationships of friendship and love. This isn’t true for everyone: there are those who can make friends, literally, even with rocks, like Professor Ryland Grace in Project Hail Mary. Sent into space in search of a cure to save our planet, the character played by Ryan Gosling encounters an alien with the same goal; having lost their respective crews and left alone, they will learn to communicate and work together, forming an unbreakable friendship.
In outer space, brotherhood can indeed blossom among the most diverse creatures: it doesn’t matter what you’re made of, what you breathe, or how many limbs you have—let alone your race, religion, or gender. A prime example of positive, largely non-dystopian science fiction, Project Hail Mary is the latest entry in a subgenre focused on relationships between humans and aliens that inspire universal love and tolerance. Here are the films (plus one series) that came before it.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
A great classic, but also the best-known film on the subject. Steven Spielberg’s E.T. tells the story of friendship between humans and aliens from a child’s perspective. Henry Thomas (Elliott) plays a lonely boy who stumbles upon an equally young alien who is trying to reunite with his kind after getting lost in the California woods. Elliott finds him and hides him in his home to protect him, managing to share a telepathic and empathetic bond with the alien that gives rise to one of the purest and most tender friendships in the history of American cinema. It is by far the most moving film on the subject and has inspired numerous imitations such as My Friend Mac, Explorers, and Navigator.
Starman (1984)
Our favorite John Carpenter is the horror filmmaker—or rather, the sci-fi horror filmmaker, as seen in The Thing—but this foray into soft sci-fi is also worth watching. Carpenter casts Jeff Bridges as an alien who responds to the invitation to contact us sent into space from Earth via the Voyager 2 probe. When the traveler arrives on Earth, however, his spacecraft is shot down by the U.S. government; he takes on the appearance of the late husband of the young widow Jenny to pass as human and avoid capture and vivisection. The woman, at first unable to accept the “theft” of her beloved’s appearance, agrees to help the fugitive return to his planet, forming an increasingly close bond of friendship and then love with him, while he learns, during his stay, what it means to be human.
Enemy Mine (1985)
In the mid-1980s, Wolfgang Petersen, the director of The Neverending Story, adapted Barry B. Longyear’s award-winning novella into a film. The story centers on two enemies of different species who, stranded alone on a hostile planet, develop a deep friendship. The human Willis Davidge (Dennis Quaid) and the reptilian alien Jeriba Shigan (Louis Gossett Jr.), soldiers from opposing factions, are forced to help each other survive on a volcanic landscape. Their mutual, visceral hatred and mistrust gradually give way to respect and friendship even under the most dramatic circumstances, particularly when Jerry, a hermaphrodite, must give birth under extreme conditions and Willis dedicates his life to protecting her offspring.
Earth Girls Are Easy (1988)
The legendary Julien Temple gave us one of the greatest films ever made about the friendships—and more—between humans and aliens (or rather, between girls from the Valley and hairy extraterrestrial giants who look like sexy Teletubbies). Geena Davis (Valerie) is a manicurist from the San Fernando Valley who’s fed up with her lackluster love life. One fine day, a spaceship crashes into her pool, from which emerge three aliens covered in thick, colorful fur, whom she takes to her friend Candy, a beautician, for a makeover. Candy shaves and styles them, transforming them into three hunks to show off at the disco. The trio is played by Jeff Goldblum (Mac), Jim Carrey (Wiploc), and Damon Wayans (Zeebo), who learn to blend in perfectly with the Valley’s nightlife. A brief fling also develops between Val and Mac: proof that, all things considered, it doesn’t take much to make new acquaintances across the universe.
Lilo & Stitch (2002–2025)
Our favorite animated film on this theme—and probably our favorite Disney film—is directed by our favorite American animator, Dean DeBlois of How to Train Your Dragon. Lilo & Stitch isn’t just about intergalactic friendships, but about the bonds between those who are different and misunderstood. On the Hawaiian Islands, little Lilo is considered a rebellious and difficult child, and her single mother struggles to help her. Their encounter with a fugitive alien—born as an experiment and genetically engineered to be a miniature destroyer—turns into a great friendship for both of them, helping them accept themselves and be accepted by others. Together, they learn that you can form a family with anyone you feel close to and love as you would love a blood relative.
Arrival (2016)
One of the most evocative science fiction films ever made was directed by Denis Villeneuve in 2016, based on Ted Chiang’s “Stories of Your Life.” It explores not only friendship between humans and aliens, but also how to lay the groundwork for communication that can eventually lead to the development of a relationship built on trust and collaboration. Linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is tasked with establishing contact with two non-humanoid alien creatures, part of a contingent that has arrived in various parts of the planet and resembling giant cephalopods that communicate through a system of circular symbols. The link between language and thought—and how the former develops thanks to the latter—offers the film’s most intriguing exploration, but it is also fascinating to witness the emergence of a relationship based on intellectual connection rather than empathy.
The Summer Hikaru Died (2025)
Based on Mokumokuren’s 2021 queer manga and adapted into an anime in 2025, The Summer Hikaru Died explores an ambiguous and subtle friendship that transforms the figure of the alien into the embodiment of the Other in a disturbing way. Yoshiki is a teenager living in a small rural Japanese village who grew up with his best friend Hikaru. At some point, he realizes that the person he’s dating, though identical to and speaking like Hikaru, is not actually him. He’ll discover that the boy has died and been replaced by a symbiotic alien entity—a sort of “ultra-body” that has inherited the original’s emotions and feelings and is therefore drawn to Yoshiki. The series explores the complicated mix of fear, attraction, and repulsion toward a creature too different to be understood, examining how far we are willing to go to accept someone we consider a monster just to avoid being alone.
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