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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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Starman
"Starman" (1984), directed by John Carpenter and starring Jeff Bridges, follows a benevolent alien who takes the physical form of a widow's deceased husband after his craft is shot down over Wisconsin, then journeys with her across the country to reach a rendezvous point before government agents can capture him. Bridges's performance as the alien learning to inhabit and move within a human body, earning him an Academy Award nomination, gave the film's contact premise an unusually physical, almost dance-like quality distinct from more dialogue-driven alien characterizations in other contact films of the era. Its road-trip structure, carrying the central pair across a wide swath of the American landscape while being pursued by a suspicious government scientist, gave "Starman" a genre-blending identity as both a first contact film and a fugitive road movie simultaneously. Its combination of Bridges's Oscar-nominated physical performance and its distinctive road-movie contact structure has made "Starman" one of the most emotionally affecting and genre-blending first contact films of the 1980s.
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