Film+and+YA+Literature+and+Martian+Child

=//Martian Child//:Reading and Analyzing Film as Text =



"Sometimes we forget that children have just arrived on the earth. They are a little like aliens, coming into beings as bundles of energy and pure potential, here on some exploratory mission and they are just trying to learn what it means to be human. For some reason Dennis and I reached out into the universe and found each other, Never really know how or why. And discovered that I can love an alien and he can love a creature. And that's weird enough for both of us" (David).

In //Martian Child// (2007), David, a science-fiction writer (John Cusack) considers whether to adopt a hyper-imaginative 6-year-old abandoned and socially rejected boy who says he's really from Mars.

The film explores the question, What's the nature of being a parent and of being a child? After a trial visit to David's home the courts will decide whether or not to approve the adoption, but the real question in the film goes deeper: Can a man become a father and a child become a son?

As David explains, "Dennis, can I just say one last thing about Mars? - which may be strange coming from a science fiction writer - But right now, you and me here, put together entirely of atoms, sitting on this round rock with a core of liquid iron, held down by this force that seems to trouble you, called gravity, all the while spinning around the sun at 67,000 miles an hour and whizzing through the Milky Way at 600,000 miles an hour in a universe that very well may be chasing its own tail at the speed of light; And admist all this frantic activity, fully cognisant of our own eminent demise - which is our own pretty way of saying we all know we're gonna die - We reach out to one another. Sometimes for the sake of entity, sometimes for reasons you're not old enough to understand yet, but a lot of the time we just reach out and expect nothing in return. Isn't that strange? Isn't that weird? Isn't that weird enough? What the heck do ya need to be from Mars for?"