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Cocoon
"Cocoon" (1985) follows a group of elderly retirement home residents who discover alien cocoons in a nearby swimming pool and gain rejuvenating youthful energy from swimming in the pool's alien-charged water, blending the first contact premise with an unusually warm, life-affirming story about aging and mortality. Its benevolent, friendly aliens, presented as genuinely well-intentioned beings seeking to rescue their dormant kin rather than any kind of invasive or hostile threat, reflected the more optimistic strain of 1980s science fiction filmmaking that "E.T." had helped popularize a few years earlier. The film's Academy Award-winning visual effects for its underwater alien cocoon sequences, combined with its genuinely moving performances from its veteran cast of older actors, gave "Cocoon" a distinctive emotional register uncommon among first contact films focused primarily on younger protagonists. Its combination of its warm, life-affirming treatment of aging and its benevolent alien contact premise has made "Cocoon" one of the most emotionally distinctive first contact films of the 1980s.
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Paul
"Paul" (2011), starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, follows two British science fiction fans on a road trip across the American Southwest who encounter a wisecracking, foul-mouthed alien named Paul who has escaped from a secret government facility, treating first contact as a comedic buddy-road-trip premise. Its affectionate parody of decades of science fiction and first contact film conventions, including direct references to "E.T.," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," and numerous other genre touchstones, reflected writers Pegg and Frost's genuine affection for the genre they were simultaneously spoofing. The film's alien character Paul, rendered through motion-capture performance and voiced by Seth Rogen, combined convincing visual effects with a deliberately crude, irreverent personality that subverted the more reverent or menacing alien characterizations typical of the genre's more serious entries. Its combination of its affectionate genre parody and its subversively irreverent alien protagonist has made "Paul" one of the most distinctly comedic entries in the first contact film tradition.
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