Ray Bradbury's April 2000: The Third Expedition

For many years, tales of human-alien interactions have been a great fascination to a large percentage of the population. Their unexpected and often times horrifying plot lines have drawn many people in, and horror story fanatics are sure to adore them, as they usually involve aspects of terror and invasion. Ray Bradbury’s “April 2000: The Third Expedition”, is a story which deals with this very aspect of human-alien interactions and alien-invasions. The story follows seventeen people as they set out on their third expedition to Mars, reaching their destination in the early unraveling of the plot. Once there, the explorers are met with a shocking reality: their deceased family members are alive, earning a “second chance” at life on this planet.

The movie begins, once again, happily, with humans living their everyday lives, unaware of what’s to come. All is well, until Elizabeth, one of the main characters, begins to feel as though her boyfriend isn’t her boyfriend anymore. She states that it’s almost as if he’s lost all of his emotion. As the movie continues, the group of main characters begins to realize that an alien invasion is at play and that aliens are duplicating human’s bodies and taking them over, controlling them. After a great deal of pondering how this could be, the group becomes aware that a plant that Elizabeth’s aforementioned boyfriend, Geoffrey, gave to her at the beginning of the movie, is what the aliens are using to duplicate all of the bodies. In horror, the group attempts to stop the invasion and save themselves and the remaining others, but to no avail. The movie ends with the aliens winning, as they take over all humans, and the group of main characters all gets invaded. Due to the loss of emotions and control of one’s body, and the characters awareness of what is happening, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” is a significantly more horrifying tale than that of “April 2000: The Third

This is an aspect that we see a great deal of in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, but contrastingly little of in “April 2000: The Third Expedition”. In Kaufman’s film, the method used by the aliens to invade the earth is the taking over of the human’s bodies. As humans fall asleep, an alien plant is used to clone their bodies, which the aliens then take to control themselves. As long as the original body stays asleep - and it will not wake up unless forced somehow - the body duplicate is the functioning organism. Each clone has all of its original memories and experiences, except all emotions are gone and the human inside of the body does not have any control over their actions; the aliens now control them. To sit inside of one’s body, seeing everything that goes on around said person, and be left with no choice but to watch as the alien controls it, would be terrifying. Although to other humans and aliens the clone would appear to have no emotions, the real person trapped inside would still feel every emotion he or she regularly would. For the majority, humans tend to dislike seeing violence, graphic scenes and cruelty. They also usually dislike letting others down or upsetting others, especially so when it comes to loved ones. Because of all of these factors, being trapped inside of one’s body with no control would easily terrify many people. Following the plot