My Thoughts on The Brother from Another Planet
Watching the low budget film for the first time proved a little difficult for me to focus on. However, as the scenes went by and the story progressed, the amount of meaning and social commentary that became evident in the movie was amazing to say the least. The main issue that is most obvious in the story is the idea of an illegal alien, quite literally since The Brother is from another planet. However, I believe that The Brother represents all of the illegal and legal immigrants, or “aliens,” that come to the United States running away from hardships back home, whether home is another planet or another country. We see in the movie that The Brother is a slave back home when he is in the gallery and shows the child that the picture of a slave running away is the same situation that he is in. We also see the two white men chasing him through Harlem, much like the white men in the image are chasing the slave. The story also does a great job of touching up on other social commentaries such as racial divisions, when the two white men get lost in Harlem and are as a result very scared, and also the drug trade, with a good chunk of the film being spent on The Brother trying to find the white drug supplier. He does so because he sees a young African American man overdose on the drug. This movie brings up a lot of issues that are very evident in our lives in America. We see how the drug business in America is mainly run by white men, but those being killed and suffering from it are people of color in poor neighborhoods. We see how illegal immigrants and people of color are seen as outsiders in our current world, and in a sense white people are afraid to interact with us or are afraid of what we might do. This could not be more relevant than today, when Ahmaud Arbery, an African American man, was running down a Georgia neighborhood when he was murdered by an armed father and son for being a black man. If only people in power, mainly white men, could understand that being an “alien” does not mean being a bad person. That much like The Brother who has the power to fix machines and heal wounds, illegals and people of color in America also have a lot to offer. We must learn to come together, like they do at the end of the movie, and fight back against the oppression, because it is only by unity that we can defeat oppression.
