The movie does end on a note of incompletion: characters still at large, maybe the second half of the story yet to come. I craved that, and walked out of the theatre speculating on what more the story could have given me: a virus that turns every human into an alien; an interspecies romance; how the black intern's role could have been bigger. What would protest marches and interspecies activist alliances have looked like, among the aliens? If they landed in 1982, what would the anti-apartheid Sun City campaign that started not much later have looked like? And if they were in South Africa that whole time, why haven't the world intelligentsia anointed some of them for speaking tours? I would totally love to see "Christopher Johnson" in an ascot at some Ivy League colloquium, deep in debate over the roots and meaning of alien poverty.

So. There was potential there, but the movie couldn't do it…the ambition was there, but not the follow-through.